Efficiency of Plasticity Correction in the Hole-Drilling Residual Stress Measurement

This paper focuses on the analysis of the plasticity effect in the measurement of the residual stress by the hole-drilling method. Relaxed strains were evaluated by the computational simulation of the hole-drilling experiment using the finite element method. Errors induced by the yielding were estimated for uniaxial tension, plane shear stress state and equi-biaxial stress state at various magnitudes of residual stress uniformly distributed along the depth. The correction of the plasticity effect in the evaluation of residual stress was realized according to the method proposed by authors from the University in Pisa, which was coded in MATLAB. Results obtained from the MATLAB script were compared to the original input data of the hole-drilling simulation and discussed. The analyses suggested that the plasticity effect is negligible at the ratio of applied equivalent stress to yield stress, being 0.6, and that the correction of the plasticity effect is very successful at the previous ratio, being 0.9. Failing to comply with the condition of the strain gauge rosette orientation according to the principal stresses directions causes an increase in the relative error of corrected stresses only for the case of uniaxial tension. It affects the relative error negligibly for the plane shear and equi-biaxial stress states.