Executive Summary : | Despite substantially advanced designs, sufficiently high working conditions and non-destructive inspections, failure of industrial components remains an important issue for better lifecycles and industrial safety. In most cases, the failure initiates from the surface or near surface regions in the form of crack initiation and propagation which then leads to the final rupture (Chahardehi et al., 2010). On the other hand, surface and near surface regions are also more prone to damage by external detrimental circumstances as these (surface and near surface regions) are the regions more exposed to such surroundings. In addition, if there exist the tensile residual stress and stress concentration sites, the scenario can be extra dreadful. Therefore, it is essential to have/develop a robust and defensive near surface region in materials/components of critical applications which can sustain any sort of external detrimental circumstances (Maawad et al., 2012; Gujba and Medraj, 2014). In practice, such surfaces can be developed using available techniques of surface modification such as peening and surface mechanical grinding technique (SMGT) (Montross et al., 2002; Gujba and Medraj, 2014; Acharya et al., 2021). The main intention and purpose of peening based techniques and SMGT is to induce compressive residual stresses and to develop gradient nanostructured surface layer. In recent years SMGT have received considerable attention as an alternative (of peening based) technique due to its simplicity (in operation) and ability to produce gradient nanocrystalline layer (Acharya et al., 2021). Most of the reports from literature (related to SMGT) are focused to explore the process parameters and near surface microstructural changes, whereas the investigations related to in-depth mechanical properties (incorporating low cycle and high cycle fatigue behavior and residual stress distribution) and gradient distribution of microstructure are inadequate. Therefore, this proposal aims to investigate the effects of SMGT on mechanical properties and microstructural aspects of commercially pure titanium (single phase here after CP-Ti) and Ti6242 (multiphase) alloys. |