The present paper deals with studying the effect of electrical discharge machining (EDM) and shot blast peening parameters on work piece fatigue lives using copper and graphite electrodes. Response surface methodology (RSM) and the design of experiment (DOE) were used to plan and design the experimental work matrices for two EDM groups of experiments using kerosene dielectric alone, while the second was treated by the shot blast peening processes after EDM machining. To verify the experimental results, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to predict the EDM models for high carbon high chromium AISI D2 die steel. The work piece fatigue lives in terms of safety factors after EDM models were developed by FEM using ANSYS 15.0 software. The results appeared that the experimental fatigue safety factors (at 106 cycles) decreased by (11 %) after EDM using copper electrodes compared with as-received material and this value is higher by (3.35 %) when using graphite electrodes. The fatigue strength at the same number of cycles was (0.88) and (0.84) times the fatigue strength of as-received material for copper and graphite electrodes respectively. While fatigue strength and safety factors increased after EDM when increasing shot peening time, at the higher shot peening time is by (19.1 %) when using copper electrodes and by (23.26 %) when using graphite electrodes.
