Determination of Residual Stress in Beams Under Bauschinger Effect Using Surface Strain Measurements

The paper explores the use of surface strain measurements to determine residual stresses induced in plastically bent beams under Bauschinger effect using minimal stress-strain data. The hardening behaviour of some materials in tensile and compressive are dissimilar specially under Bauschinger effect. It is therefore ideally necessary to obtain both tensile and compressive stress-strain data in order to determine residual stresses in such materials. The paper shows that the compression stress-strain data can be implicitly determined from tensile and bending stress-strain results by using equilibrium considerations. This removes the need for separate compression tests to be carried out. The agreement of the derived stress-strain data in compression and of residual stress with experimental results is encouraging.