Estimation of the Yield Stress of Stainless Steel from the Vickers Hardness Taking Account of the Residual Stress

Abstract

In this paper, a method that uses the Vickers hardness to estimate the yield stress of a metallic material with taking account of residual stress is proposed. Although the yield stress of bulk metal can be evaluated by a tensile test, it cannot be applied to local yield stress varied by surface modification methods, such as the peening technique which introduces high compressive residual stress at the surface. Therefore, to evaluate the local yield stress employing a relatively easy way, the Vickers hardness test was conducted in this paper. Since the Vickers hardness depends on both the residual stress and the yield stress, the relationship between the residual stress and the Vickers hardness was experimentally examined. It was concluded that the yield stress of the surface treated by several peening techniques can be estimated from the Vickers hardness once this has been corrected for residual stress.