Assessing welding residual stress in A335 P12 steel welds before and after stress-relaxation annealing through instrumented indentation technique

Conventional nondestructive techniques for welding residual stress measurement have many disadvantages in the field because of poor repeatability, large scatter in data, complex procedures, inaccurate results, etc. To overcome these difficulties, an instrumented indentation technique was applied to evaluate the welding residual stress in A335 P12 steel welds in electric power-plant facilities before and after stress-relaxation annealing. Comparison of our results with stress values obtained from a destructive saw-cutting test showed that the instrumented indentation technique is very useful for quantitative/nondestructive evaluation of welding residual stresses in industrial facilities such as power-plants. (C) 2003 Acta Materialia Inc. Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.