A review of recent developments and applications in the field of X-ray diffraction for residual stress studies

Much research effort has been conducted recently in the field of residual stresses. This presentation is a review of different studies carried out during the last few years on the X-ray diffraction technique. The first part of this paper presents an introduction to the residual stresses and the different techniques of measurement. The second part of this paper is focused on the X-ray diffraction technique. Then the different factors that affect the measurement results are discussed and some examples shown for different applications of the X-ray method. The last part of the work deals with the residual stress measurement techniques and the overall necessity to combine destructive (incremental hole drilling) and non-destructive (X-ray and neutron diffraction) methods in order to evaluate precisely the residual stress distribution.