Residual Stresses Evaluation in Welds and Implications for Design for Pressure Vessel Applications

Welding residual stresses have important consequences on the performance of engineering components. High residual stresses may lead to loss of performance in corrosion, fatigue, and fracture but as yet these consequences are poorly quantified. The major cause of this is that residual stress often remains the single largest unknown in industrial damage situations since it is difficult to measure or estimate theoretically. One of the key issues in the study of residual stress is that the detail of the stress distribution on a small scale (in the order of millimeters) can be important. In this paper, the neutron diffraction technique is used which while it is a very expensive technique, is capable of nondestructively measuring residual stresses at this scale up to a depth of $35mm$⁠. The investigation reported compares the residual stress characteristics due to various restraints for a single bead and in fully restrained samples with different numbers of beads. This paper considers the results of the neutron diffraction studies in relation to fitness for purpose guidance and implication for pressure vessel design.