The bodies of aircraft structures have a lot of fastener holes and under different situations these holes bear external forces, which cause a tensile stress on the surface that leads to the failure of materials. Cold expansion process is one of the widely-used methods to improve the fatigue behavior of materials used in aerospace industry, and such improvement is due to the compressive residual stress around cold expanded hole. The induced residual stress distribution around cold expanded hole is affected by several parameters such as, diametrical interfaces, surface finish of fastener holes, temperature, mandrel speed, i.e. the speed of inserting mandrel into the hole, and so on. In previous studies, most of effective parameters were investigated, whereas, the effect of mandrel speed on the residual stress distribution has not been considered. The present study, seeks to simulate cold expansion process on aluminum alloy 2A12TA using ABAQUS finite element (FE) package and to consider the effect of different mandrel speeds on residual stress distribution around cold expanded hole. It aims to verify the results of FE simulation by experimental data. Design/methodology/approach – There are two kinds of data in this paper; experimental and FE results. The experimental results for cold expansion process have been extracted from the literature and ABAQUS finite element package was employed in order to simulate the above-mentioned process. Moreover, FE results were validated by the experiments. Findings – The results presented here show the influence of mandrel speed on residual stress distribution around cold expanded hole using a new analytical-numerical method. The results gained by FE simulation show relative differences between the diagrams of residual stress distribution corresponding different mandrel speeds. It is shown in the paper; the residual stress around cold expanded hole rises by the increase of mandrel speed and consequently the improvement of fatigue life will be achieved.

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