Determination of residual-stress variation with depth by the hole-drilling method

The hole-drilling method is a residual-stress measurement technique in which a blind hole (usually 1.6 mm or 3.2 mm in diameter) is drilled into a material and the strain perturbances around the hole are measured by surfacemounted strain gages. The conventional hole-drilling-method procedure is to analyze the net strain changes due to the drilling of the full-depth hole (usually about 100 percent of hole diameter) and to interpret the resulting stress calculations insofar as they represent the average stresses through the hole depth. It has been determined that this procedure may lead to significant errors, particularly where there are large stress variations through the hole depth. Such errors may be difficult to detect simply by observing the strain data. This paper describes a finite-element procedure which was used to develop calibration constants to allow measurements of residual-stress variation with depth to be routinely performed by the hole-drilling method.