Novel bulk triaxial residual stress mapping in an additive manufactured bridge sample by coupling energy dispersive X-ray diffraction and contour method measurements

A novel approach for determining triaxial residual stress states by coupling energy dispersive X-ray diffraction and contour method measurements is provided and validated in a Ti‐5Al‐5V‐5Mo‐3Cr additive manufactured (AM) bridge sample. Synchrotron X-ray diffraction (SXRD) can provide relatively fine spatial resolution (on the order of 10–100 µm) for mapping 3D elastic strain fields within a sample. However, for samples with dimensions larger than one or two centimeters the path length can get prohibitive as both constant wavelength and energy dispersive SXRD are based upon transmission measurements. As an example, for a plate-like sample geometry where the thickness is limited (less than a centimeter) it is trivial to measure the longitudinal and height direction elastic strain components with excellent in-plane spatial resolution (∼100 µm) and a somewhat lower through-thickness resolution (10–15 times larger) but obtaining the through thickness component is often not possible as the beam path must be parallel to one of the large dimensions of the plate. While small samples of low Z-number alloys (e.g., Ti or Al) allow determination of the three elastic strain components, this is often not the case for higher Z alloys (e.g., Fe or Ni) or large samples where some strain components can be indeterminable. To overcome these limitations, this work applies a combination of synchrotron X-ray diffraction and the contour method (a mechanical relaxation technique), to determine the triaxial stress state. This novel combination is demonstrated and validated in a relatively small additive manufactured sample where all three orthogonal strain components are accessible via X-ray diffraction for stress determination. The paper also explores methods for determining the strain-free lattice parameter, typically obtained from a small stress-free reference sample. This work shows that a small size AM sample is not stress free, producing unreliable magnitudes of strain and stress. Instead, a strain-free lattice parameter is determined using residual stress equilibrium conditions, which gives consistent strain and stress trends for both X-ray diffraction (alone) and the new diffraction-contour coupling technique. This demonstrates that the coupling technique can be confidently applied to samples to determine stress when path length (size or Z-number) prohibit determination of three orthogonal strain components via diffraction.