EVALUATION OF THE STRESS-FIELD IN A GROUND STEEL PLATE FROM ENERGY-DISPERSIVE X-RAY-DIFFRACTION EXPERIMENTS

We show that energy-dispersive X-ray diffraction is a very powerful tool for the investigation of complex stress fields which occur in the surface region of polycrystalline materials after plastic deformation. The interplanar spacings of 11 lattice planes of a ground steel plate were investigated for psi angles up to 88-degrees, covering a penetration depth of the X-rays from 0.04 to 60 mum. The results were evaluated according to a novel formalism and yield the variation in the residual stress components sigma11(z) and sigma22(Z) with the depth z below the ground surface. The formalism and the results are critically discussed.