Residual stress measurement techniques: A review

Compressive residual stresses are desirable because it decreases the speed of crack initiation and prolong fatigue life but at the same time residual stresses are having negative effects on the distortion, corrosion resistance, dimensional stability and brittle fracture of the component. Residual stress also plays a vital role in with respect of fatigue strength of material. Because of these effects maintenance cost and service life of the components declines. Therefore it is of interest to investigate the residual stress. There are so many methods have been developed so far for the measurement of the residual stress such as Destructive or non-destructive. Mechanical methods (Destructive and Semi destructive) based up on measurement of deformations due to release of residual stresses up on deduction of material from specimen and Nondestructive technique measures some parameters that are related to stresses. The main objective of this work is to analyze Residual stress measurement techniques which is most commonly used in industry and academia are considered: x-ray and neutron diffraction, hole-drilling, sectioning, Barkhausen, eddy current and ultrasonic methods. Out of all destructive techniques, hole-drilling is utmost used method due to well-established, cheap and simplicity. For nondestructives techniques X-ray diffraction is the furthermost used technique, because of it's widely availability, versatility, wide range of materials and macro and micro residual stress measuring. This paper gives the information of the recent advancement in the residual stress measuring techniques to help researchers on selecting their techniques hang on upon their applicability and the availabilities of those techniques. This paper represents physical limitation, scope, advantages and disadvantages for each technique. This paper also represents promising directions for future developments.