Guidelines for Establishing an Optimum Shot Peening Specification for Gearing

The shot peening process has been widely recognized for many years as a proven, cost-effective process to greatly enhance the fatigue characteristics of metal parts and eliminate problems of stress corrosion cracking. Additional benefits of the process in the last few years have also been recognized in the areas of forming and texturizing. Though the process is widely used today, the means of specifying process parameters and controlling documents for process control are not widely understood. Questions as to what shot size and intensity to specify, along with what to put on the blueprint to assure a high quality and repeatable shot peening process, are continually asked by many design and materials engineers.