Residual stress analysis in industrial parts: a comprehensive comparison of XRD methods

A recently emerged XRD-based cosα residual stress measurement method, which utilizes imaging plate detectors, has attracted special attention from both academia and industry. There are uncertainties about to which extent the method could be used and about the accuracy of the measurements when analyzing industrial components. This work investigates the accuracy of the method by targeting four common types of material structures for the XRD experiments: preferred orientation of the microstructure (texture effect), coarse grain microstructure (coarse grain effect), a combination of both, and materials with steep lateral or in-depth residual stress gradients. The analysis was carried out by the conventionally used sin2ψ and the newly developed cosα methods on ferritic and austenitic steels, aluminum alloys, and SiSiC ceramics. The results indicate that both methods are reliable in most cases. However, cosα method has higher uncertainties and is more sensitive to the initial microstructure of the material.