Standards for Residual Stress Measurement

It has been long appreciated that residual stresses can exert significant influences on fatigue and fracture behavior, but only recently have analytical models been developed which enable the influences to be quantified. These new capabilities have fostered increased demands for residual stress measurements and these, in turn, have revealed that the reliability and the reproducibility of such measurements are often less than adequate. The need for standards for residual stress measurements is now recognized as being urgent. Few standards presently exist, and they do not provide the required levels of measurement reproducibility.

Several organizations are attempting to respond to this critical need. This paper is a status report on the growing national effort to develop voluntary consensus standards to enhance the reproducibility of residual stress measurements. This effort has achieved noteworthy progress in only a few years, but it has also become evident that further progress will be increasingly more difficult because our understanding of some residual stress phenomena is limited. There is need for a national research effort to parallel and to support the standardization effort.