Bolts are important fasteners indispensable in the manufacturing field for their advantages, which include convenient assembly and disassembly, easy maintenance, refastenability to prevent looseness, and the avoidance of a phase change in the connected material composition. The precise control of the tightening force in bolts is closely related to the safety and reliability of the connected equipment or structure. Although there are many methods for estimating the tightening force applied to a bolt during assembly, poor accuracy in controlling the preload during the tightening process and a lack of monitoring to determine the residual axial force in service remain issues in evaluating the safety of bolted assemblies. As a nondestructive testing technology, ultrasonic measurement can be applied to successfully address these issues. In order to help researchers understand the theoretical basis and technological development in this field and to equip them to conduct further in-depth research, in this review, the basic knowledge describing the state of stress and deformation of bolts, as well as conventional testing methods are summarized and analyzed. Then, through a review of recent research of the ultrasonic measurement of the axial stress in bolts, the influence of the effective stressed length and temperature are analyzed and proposed methods of calibration and compensation are reviewed. In order to avoid coupling errors caused by traditional piezoelectric transducers, two newly proposed ultrasonic coupling technologies, the electromagnetic acoustic transducer (EMAT) and the permanent mounted transducer system (PMTS), are reviewed. Finally, the new direction of research of the detection of residual axial stress in in-service bolts that have been assembled to yield is discussed.

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The automatic measurement, especially for products with complex shapes, has always been one of the most important application areas of robots. Aiming at the challenge of measuring residual stress under curved surface, in this paper, the residual stress ultrasonic measuring robot system with two manipulators is constructed, which is based on combining industrial robot technology with residual stress ultrasonic nondestructive measuring technology. The system is mainly composed of a motion control system, an ultrasonic detection system, and a data processing system. The robotic arm controls the movement of the two ultrasonic transducers along the set scanning path which is based on the geometric model of components and adjusts the transducer’s posture in time according to the shape of the workpiece being measured. The configuration information based on workpiece coordinate system is transformed into a position data that takes into consideration the first critical angle and can be recognized by the robot. Considering the effect of curvature, the principle model of residual stress measuring by the critical refraction longitudinal wave is established. The measured signal including the stress state of the measured region, as well as the actual position and posture information of the transducers, is processed by the computer in real time, which realizes automatic nondestructive measurement of residual stress under curved surface.

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