Abstract: This paper presents a method for stress decay rate analysis of the self-equilibrated end load problem.Using the boundary element method,the minimum stress decay rate of elastic cylinder with elliptical or rectangular section,subjected to the self-equilibrated end load is obtained.The numerical results show that the variation of the minimum decay rate is small when the ratio of the longer axis to the shorter one ofthe ellip-tic section or the ratio of the length to the width of the rectangular section of the...