  Standard spring design is based on the assumption that there is no residual
stress in the wire. This assumption can be quite strong for small wires that
undergo a significant wire drawing during the manufacturing process. The main
objective of this work is to design and test a method for characterizing
residual stresses in small diameter drawn wires. The basic principle consists
in removing a part of the material and then measuring the associated
displacements. This material removal was simulated by finite elements and
experimented in real situation. The first results are encouraging because they
seem to show that the residual stresses in the wire studied are significant,
and justify our investigations.
