X-ray Diffraction Debye Ring Analysis for Stress Measurement (DRAST) : a new method to evaluate residual stresses

Residual stresses are one of the important feature determining the performance of structural as well as functional materials. Since residual stresses are difficult to be predicted they must be reliably measured. X-Ray microdiffraction laboratory systems equipped with 2D detectors allow to evaluate them with a very high spatial resolution. In this work a new method to evaluate residual stresses based on the analysis of a single Debye ring is proposed. This method is particularly suitable for the stress analysis of coatings and for sample with complex geometry. Examples are discussed and the results compared with those obtained by the conventional d-sin2psi method.