Young's modulus is a mechanical property of solid materials that measures the tensile or compressive stiffness when the force is applied lengthwise. It is the modulus of elasticity for tension or axial compression. Young's modulus is defined as the ratio of the stress applied to the object and the resulting axial strain in the linear elastic region of the material.
In engineering, deformation may be elastic or plastic. If the deformation is negligible, the object is said to be rigid.
In mechanics, compressive strength is the capacity of a material or structure to withstand loads tending to reduce size (compression). It is opposed to tensile strength which withstands loads tending to elongate, resisting tension. In the study of strength of materials, compressive strength, tensile strength, and shear strength can be analyzed independently.
Stress–strain analysis is an engineering discipline that uses many methods to determine the stresses and strains in materials and structures subjected to forces. In continuum mechanics, stress is a physical quantity that expresses the internal forces that neighboring particles of a continuous material exert on each other, while strain is the measure of the deformation of the material.
Fracture mechanics is the field of mechanics concerned with the study of the propagation of cracks in materials. It uses methods of analytical solid mechanics to calculate the driving force on a crack and those of experimental solid mechanics to characterize the material's resistance to fracture.
Work hardening, also known as strain hardening, is the process by which a material's load-bearing capacity (strength) increases during plastic (permanent) deformation. This characteristic is what sets ductile materials apart from brittle materials. Work hardening may be desirable, undesirable, or inconsequential, depending on the application.
In engineering and materials science, necking is a mode of tensile deformation where relatively large amounts of strain localize disproportionately in a small region of the material. The resulting prominent decrease in local cross-sectional area provides the basis for the name "neck". Because the local strains in the neck are large, necking is often closely associated with yielding, a form of plastic deformation associated with ductile materials, often metals or polymers. Once necking has begun, the neck becomes the exclusive location of yielding in the material, as the reduced area gives the neck the largest local stress.
In materials science and engineering, the yield point is the point on a stress–strain curve that indicates the limit of elastic behavior and the beginning of plastic behavior. Below the yield point, a material will deform elastically and will return to its original shape when the applied stress is removed. Once the yield point is passed, some fraction of the deformation will be permanent and non-reversible and is known as plastic deformation.
The three-point bending flexural test provides values for the modulus of elasticity in bending , flexural stress , flexural strain and the flexural stress–strain response of the material. This test is performed on a universal testing machine with a three-point or four-point bend fixture. The main advantage of a three-point flexural test is the ease of the specimen preparation and testing. However, this method has also some disadvantages: the results of the testing method are sensitive to specimen and loading geometry and strain rate.
The J-integral represents a way to calculate the strain energy release rate, or work (energy) per unit fracture surface area, in a material. The theoretical concept of J-integral was developed in 1967 by G. P. Cherepanov and independently in 1968 by James R. Rice, who showed that an energetic contour path integral was independent of the path around a crack.
In materials science the flow stress, typically denoted as Yf, is defined as the instantaneous value of stress required to continue plastically deforming a material - to keep it flowing. It is most commonly, though not exclusively, used in reference to metals. On a stress-strain curve, the flow stress can be found anywhere within the plastic regime; more explicitly, a flow stress can be found for any value of strain between and including yield point and excluding fracture : .
The Ramberg–Osgood equation was created to describe the nonlinear relationship between stress and strain—that is, the stress–strain curve—in materials near their yield points. It is especially applicable to metals that harden with plastic deformation, showing a smooth elastic-plastic transition. As it is a phenomenological model, checking the fit of the model with actual experimental data for the particular material of interest is essential.
The T-failure criterion is a set of material failure criteria that can be used to predict both brittle and ductile failure.
Damage mechanics is concerned with the representation, or modeling, of damage of materials that is suitable for making engineering predictions about the initiation, propagation, and fracture of materials without resorting to a microscopic description that would be too complex for practical engineering analysis.
Methods have been devised to modify the yield strength, ductility, and toughness of both crystalline and amorphous materials. These strengthening mechanisms give engineers the ability to tailor the mechanical properties of materials to suit a variety of different applications. For example, the favorable properties of steel result from interstitial incorporation of carbon into the iron lattice. Brass, a binary alloy of copper and zinc, has superior mechanical properties compared to its constituent metals due to solution strengthening. Work hardening has also been used for centuries by blacksmiths to introduce dislocations into materials, increasing their yield strengths.
Viscoplasticity is a theory in continuum mechanics that describes the rate-dependent inelastic behavior of solids. Rate-dependence in this context means that the deformation of the material depends on the rate at which loads are applied. The inelastic behavior that is the subject of viscoplasticity is plastic deformation which means that the material undergoes unrecoverable deformations when a load level is reached. Rate-dependent plasticity is important for transient plasticity calculations. The main difference between rate-independent plastic and viscoplastic material models is that the latter exhibit not only permanent deformations after the application of loads but continue to undergo a creep flow as a function of time under the influence of the applied load.
Material failure theory is an interdisciplinary field of materials science and solid mechanics which attempts to predict the conditions under which solid materials fail under the action of external loads. The failure of a material is usually classified into brittle failure (fracture) or ductile failure (yield). Depending on the conditions most materials can fail in a brittle or ductile manner or both. However, for most practical situations, a material may be classified as either brittle or ductile.
In solid mechanics, the Johnson–Holmquist damage model is used to model the mechanical behavior of damaged brittle materials, such as ceramics, rocks, and concrete, over a range of strain rates. Such materials usually have high compressive strength but low tensile strength and tend to exhibit progressive damage under load due to the growth of microfractures.
In geotechnical engineering, rock mass plasticity is the study of the response of rocks to loads beyond the elastic limit. Historically, conventional wisdom has it that rock is brittle and fails by fracture, while plasticity is identified with ductile materials such as metals. In field-scale rock masses, structural discontinuities exist in the rock indicating that failure has taken place. Since the rock has not fallen apart, contrary to expectation of brittle behavior, clearly elasticity theory is not the last word.
Anelasticity is a property of materials that describes their behaviour when undergoing deformation. Its formal definition does not include the physical or atomistic mechanisms but still interprets the anelastic behaviour as a manifestation of internal relaxation processes. It is a behaviour differing from elastic behaviour.
