Effect of laser shock peening on wear behaviors of TC11 alloy at elevated temperature

Titanium alloy is regarded as a high performance material which has wide application prospect in aerospace and medical field. However, their poor wear properties may lead to failures in early service stages. In this paper, the microstructure, micro-hardness and residual stress of TC11 alloy treated by laser shock peening (LSP) are investigated. The sliding wear experiments are performed to study the influence of various temperature and applied load on the wear behaviors of TC11 alloy with and without LSP. The results indicate that the LSPed specimen has a superior wear properties to that of as-received specimen under the same wear test conditions. The tribological properties are greatly dependent on wear testing temperature and applied load. For the specimens tested under 15 N, the variation trend of friction coefficient and wear rate reduces first (25–500 °C) and then increases (500–600 °C) with increasing the test temperature. When the sliding wear test conducted at 400 °C, the larger the applied load, the more the friction coefficient and wear rate. The prominent tribological performances of LSPed TC11 alloy is ascribed to the high compressive residual stress and grain refinement induced by LSP.