Granular gases in mechanical engineering: on the origin of heterogeneous ultrasonic shot peening

The behavior of an ultrasonic shot peening process is observed and analyzed by using a model of inelastic hard spheres in a gravitational field that are fluidized by a vibrating bottom wall (sonotrode) in a cylindrical chamber. A marked heterogeneous distribution of impacts appears when the collision between the shot and the side wall becomes inelastic with constant dissipation. This effect is one order of magnitude larger than the simple heterogeneity arising from boundary collision on the cylinder. Variable restitution coefficients bring the simulation closer to the general observation and allow the investigation of peening regimes with changing shot density. We compute within this model other physical quantities (impact velocities, impact angle, temperature and density profile) that are influenced by the number N of spheres.