A fast procedure of stress state evaluation in magnetically anisotropic steels with the help of a probe with adjustable magnetizing field direction

The paper presents a novel approach to the stress state evaluation issue. It deals with a strongly (magnetically) anisotropic materials for which a direct interpretation of the Barkhausen effect (BE) intensity would lead to erroneous results. In such a case one has to take into account both the measured BE intensity and the orientation of the magnetisation direction relative to the magnetic easy axis. For the in plane stress distribution evaluation one has to perform at least three measurements in the non-collinear directions. The application of an apparatus with automatically changing magnetizing field direction allows to obtain the angular distribution of the BE intensity in about 30 s (with the angular step of 10 degrees). Thanks to the dedicated post-processing software the procedure of the measurement data processing, resulting in the full information on the stress distribution (main stress components and their orientation in all the investigated points) is almost instantaneous. Apart from the measurement results the stress determination procedure requires two additional pieces of information. The first one is the calibration data obtained for at least two applied strain directions (along easy and hard magnetisation axes)-the data for the intermediate orientations are usually interpolated. The second one is the 'reference level' of the BE intensity angular distribution. In the case of welded plates it is obtained by averaging the results obtained at the analysed points before welding. The way of results presentation proposed in that paper is very illustrative and shows an interesting feature of the stress distribution in welded plates-namely the appearance of a 'vortex' structure of main stress.