Preliminary Analysis for a New Approach to Relieve Residual Stresses by Laser Heating

Stress relief heat treatment is used to reduce the residual stresses in a structure produced from manufacturing processes. There are many sources of residual stresses, and in particular those due to welding process could be of a magnitude roughly equal to the yield strength of the base material. Uniformly heating a structure to a sufficiently high temperature, but below the lower transformation temperature range, and then uniformly cooling it, can relax these residual stresses. In this paper the attention is focused on the possibility to use a high power laser source that local heats a component in order to relieve the residual stresses. An experimental set up is carried out on aluminum specimen and the preliminary results reported in this paper.