Procedure to Perform a Validated Incremental Hole Drilling Measurement: Application to Shot Peening Residual Stresses

The paper describes a test rig designed to check and assess the accuracy of the incremental hole drilling (IHD) method. An external load produces a controlled linearly through thickness variable uniaxial stress field (reference bending stress), known with good accuracy, that can be applied and removed at each hole increment. After the separation between the bending relaxed strain from the residual stress relaxed strain, it is possible to reproduce the bending stress distribution in order to have complete confidence of the residual stress measurement. The bending verification of the IHD method was already proposed by other investigators before, but residual stress measurements were then performed on independent configurations. The proposed testing procedure gives a 'real time' verification of the residual stress measurement. Any experimental malfunctioning due to the operator inexperience, or any error during the stress calculation from the relaxed strain would produce an evident difference between the expected reference bending stress and the IHD bending stress output. Moreover, the reference bending stress helped for understanding that the not perfect hole cylindrical shape causes an underestimate of the predicted stress near the surface. A zero depth offset correction was proposed. This correction was tested on the reference bending stress, and then applied to the residual stress prediction. Three shot peening residual stresses IHD measurements were successfully validated by means of the bending stress; moreover, they were in good agreement with independent X-ray diffraction measures also proposed in the paper.