The deep hole drilling (DHD) method measures the through‐thickness distribution of residual stress in a component. Sources of uncertainty in the application of the method are identified and three different methods for determining the magnitudes of uncertainty are presented. The analyses are applied to experimental measurements of stress in two calibration studies for ferritic steel and an aluminium alloy. Finally, the residual stresses measured in a repair welded steel pipe are examined to assess the level of uncertainty.

Residual stresses, created in a steel beam by elastic-plastic bending, are predicted using an approximate analysis and the finite element method. The predictions are compared to experimental measurements obtained from the application of incremental centre hole drilling, deep hole drilling and neutron diffraction methods. Finite element simulations of the incremental centre hole drilling and deep hole drilling methods applied to the predicted residual stresses permitted an assessment of their ability to reconstruct the stresses. An analytical reconstruction analysis using an Airy stress function together with boundary and equilibrium conditions is developed and applied to the predictions and measurements. The reconstruction of the predictions enabled a reference case to be developed and used to assess the application of the reconstruction process to experimental data. It is shown that satisfactory through depth residual stress profiles can be obtained, providing the errors are about the same of those found in the measurement techniques.

No abstract

No abstract

Residual stress measurement techniques using mechanical strain relaxation depend on a number of physical quantities and are therefore sensitive to errors associated with the measured data. The resulting stress uncertainties can easily become significant and compromise the usefulness of the results or lead to misinterpretation of the behaviour of the residual stress distributions. It is therefore essential to develop an error analysis procedure for the measurements undertaken. Error analysis procedures for the deep hole drilling (DHD) method are developed to consider triaxial residual stresses. A modified deep hole drilling method, called the incremental deep-hole drilling (iDHD), was applied to measure the near yield residual stress distributions in a cold water quenched aluminium 7010 alloy forged block. The experimental results are used to illustrate the errors.