Home Search Collections Journals About Contact us My IOPscience Residual stress and its role in failure This article has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text article. 2007 Rep. Prog. Phys. 70 2211 (http://iopscience.iop.org/0034-4885/70/12/R04) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more Download details: IP Address: 213.233.174.211 The article was downloaded on 19/12/2010 at 14:34 Please note that terms and conditions apply. IOP PUBLISHING REPORTS ON PROGRESS IN PHYSICS Rep. Prog. Phys. 70 (2007) 2211–2264 doi:10.1088/0034-4885/70/12/R04 Residual stress and its role in failure P J Withers School of Materials, University of Manchester, Grosvenor St., Manchester, M1 7HS, UK E-mail:
[email protected] Received 15 January 2007, in final form 17 September 2007 Published 27 November 2007 Online at stacks.iop.org/RoPP/70/2211 Abstract Our safety, comfort and peace of mind are heavily dependent upon our capability to prevent, predict or postpone the failure of components and structures on the basis of sound physical principles. While the external loadings acting on a material or component are clearly important, There are other contributory factors including unfavourable materials microstructure, pre- existing defects and residual stresses. Residual stresses can add to, or subtract from, the applied stresses and so when unexpected failure occurs it is often because residual stresses have combined critically with the applied stresses, or because together with the presence of undetected defects they have dangerously lowered the applied stress at which failure will occur.