Helen,

Your guesses are definitely close to the mark. In the sense of peened soft metals, what you are doing is cold-working it all the way through, which tangles up dislocations and makes them less likely to move. Shot peening is indeed a specific type, using hard balls (usually metal or ceramic) fired at high speed to work the surface of a metal. This does do cold work, but only on the surface. There is also laser peening, which takes advantage of the thermal stresses induced by very high, localized heat and consequent superhigh cooling rates to induce the same stresses as shot peening, only with less mess, deeper, and more uniformly. Even better is hydropeening, which a water curtain is heated with a laser, and the superheating causes detonations on a very small scale, also inducing those favorable compressive stresses.

Cheers,
Bryan


Cheers,
Bryan

You are only wretched and unworthy if you choose to be.