Applications

The residual stress diffractometer can be used to reveal residual stresses:

In thermo-mechanically processed metals (e.g. products of rolling process) such as:
 

- Rails, wires, springs
- Metal sheets, bars and rounds, extrusions
- Pipelines and tubes
- Machined components (e.g. airplane panels)
- Deep drawing products
- Forgings and stampings

• In different welded components, including dissimilar metal welding, joined using different methods like:

 
- Arc welding: SMAW, GMAW (MIG) and GTAW (TIG)
- Laser and laser-hybrid welding
- Electron beam welding
- Friction welding (rotary and linear)
- Friction stir welding
- Electric resistance welding and MIAB
- Electromagnetic pulse welding
- Explosion welding

• In bulk components produced by different material deposition techniques:

 
- Spray casting, spray deposition, spray forming
- (Wire-, arc-, laser-) additive layer manufacturing and rapid prototyping
- Powder metallurgy
- Casting

• In bulk multi-phase and composite materials such as:

- Al-Sip casting
- Ni based superalloys (γ/γ’)

• In thick (1-10mm) and thin (200-1000 μm) coatings (metal, ceramic, composite) such as thermal barrier, wear resistant and corrosion resistant made by different techniques such as:
   

- Thermal spray
- Cold spray
- HVOF
- Laser cladding
 

• In components treated with different surface treatment techniques such as:

 
- Grit blasting
- Low plasticity burnishing and rolling 
- Shot peening
- Laser shock peening
- Other types of peening (waterjet, cavitation, UIT)
- Foreign object damage

In geological materials:
 

- Rocks, minerals, granulated compacts
- Ice

The following material science physical phenomena can be studied in the residual stress experiment:

• Stress corrosion cracking due to extreme environments such as:

- Heat and pressure/stress (pressure pipes of power generators)
- Corrosive environment and stress (pipelines, steel reinforcement in concrete)

• Fatigue, crack growth and development in materials undergoing external loading or contact stress in structural components or load-bearing parts.
   
• Shape-memory alloys - these materials can return to their original shape after bending or deformation (e.g. vascular stents) and are used in medical and aerospace applications.

• In-situ plastic deformation experiment can reveal information on details of deformation mechanism of material (activation of slip systems, dynamic recrystallization, etc.). Frequently, this experiment is done using elevated temperatures and different rates of deformation.
   
• Creep, in spite of necessary time commitments, also can be studied, especially high temperature creep at constant load.
   
• Texture formation can be routinely studied using our Eulerian cradles