9. WHAT DO WE MEAN BY 'STRONG"” Strength and stress ‘Strong’ is & word we use frequently without stopping to ask ourselves what it really means. The dictionary defines it.as meaning "having power of Tesistance, not easily broken or torn, or worn, firmn, solid." Quite offen we use the word ‘strong’ when we really mean ‘rigid’ end as we shall see, they are not the same, From a scientific standpoint, none of these definitions 1s really satisfactory. It's one of those words that yoa Would probably define by using the well worn phrase "you know what I mean", meaning that you really are not sure! Even scientists sometimes use the word rather Joosely because there is no one meaning for the term. Ifyou were given a piece of blackboard chalk and asked to break it you would almost certainly do so by bending it between your two thumbs and two forefingers, From a scientific standpoint you would be performing a four point bend test, The following diagram illustrates what happens. At the center you push up, usually with ee at Be eat you petra weer fingers. In the laboratory this woul ‘One way of measuring the strength of a material. ‘This is called the bend strength, The four point bend test for a material, There are rwo exniral points where 2 force i applied upwards, aid two cod poines where the fore is dowmwazds, ‘You could also hold one end of the chalk ‘tightly in your fist while Frabbing the other end and twisting it, Hf you try it, you will find that this method of breaking is more: difficalt, although you will probably succeed. You should 20 notice that fracture has occurred at an oblique angle to the length ofthe chalk sather than almost perpendicular to the chalk as was the case with the bend test.* 3-point bend test to measure room T strength. cross section ‘Adapted from Fig. 12.29, Callister 6. oe b | rect. circ. ™ location of max tension —_ « Flexural strength: * Typ. values: Material MPa) —E(GPa) _ fail _ 1.5Fmaxt = Frmaxt a ores) es) =Om =——, =~ _q Sinitride 700-1000 300 bd? aR? Sicarbide 560-860 430 fF, et Aloxide 275-550 390 ma’ glass (soda) 69 69 Data from Table 12.5, Callister 62. oe af ANAK neIn this case you will have tested the shear strength of the material. Shear strenetth is important for rods of material which are rotating. You may - been driving a screw into a hard material only to have it break, or shear is because you have exceeded the shear strength. Rotating axles in aay somnetine fail in this way. If we take the piece of chalk and hold one end while pulling on the other ‘und it breaks we aré testing its tensile strength. If we hang 2 weight on a ‘wite we are putting it into tension. The same oceurs when we stretch a guitar string to tune the instrument, Too much tension and it breaks. We apply what ‘we call a temsile Toad to the material; We are pulling it. As we increase the load the string stretches and then breaks, The same happens with our picce of chalk although we need special equipment to see the stretch because it is so small. Materials sach as the piece of chalk, notably ceramics, break im a brittle manner, showing very little: stretch before they fail. Others, such as some plastics: and rubber, will siretch to several times their original length before they break. When the tnaterial beeaks we say that is has reached its breaking strength, or to use the correct scientific jargon, it has reached its ultimate tensile strength (UTS). This is the maximum load the material can carry without breaking. The following diagram illustrates a simple way of measuring the UTS. A rod of material is held dghtly at one end while a weight, or led, is applied to the: other. The weight is increased until the material can take no more A miaterial breaks im tension when itt Unnsile strength is exceeded, ‘Tf we are building something, be [ta building or a piece of are always aware that we don't want components to bret ite think ts uyhappen we have two alternatives: either use a stronger material or ust a thicker piece of the same material, something we sometimes call “beefing it up." We are all awrate that thicker things are more difficult tp boeak. The simple reason in thal there are more bonds to break, ‘Never lose sight of the fact that in neariy all cases, breaking @ material means breaking bonds between atoms. Now while it may be good to know how much Weight a material can bear before breaking, we are often not interested in approaching this value, What is of thors concem, especially for a metal, is how much weight ican bear before it really begins to stretch. This means that the dislocations are now beplaning to spove freely in the material so thet there is @ lot of movernent of slip pl OVEL each other, But there is no definite point st which we can say this The Ioad required to permanently stretch the rod by this amount is known as the yield strength (YS). ‘We say that the rod has suffered a 0.2% plastic strain deformation. As far as we are concemed we shall loosely say thet the ‘Yield strength defines when the metal material begins to defocm permanently. We shall come back to a definition of strain Inter, For ceramic materials especially we define a fifth strength, called the ‘compressive strength. [f we take a short thick md of this material, place one fod on 3 tigid, strong surfacc and pile weighs on top, the material Will again eventually fail, The weight required to ‘produce this break defines the compressive strength of the material. For ceramics the compressive strength is troch larger than its tensile strength and bend strecgth, This is why we can use Concrete foundations to support large buildings. We shall later sec why this is, aad how we can use it to make ceramics more serviceable. Just wy crashing 2 stick of chalk between your hand and a table: you will probably huct your hand before the chalk breaks. The following diagram illustrates how we measure the com] ve st of a material. Here again, fracture occurs at ap oblique tnee to the length of the piece although it is unlikely to be as clean a break as ig depicted, Because we are really crushing the materisl there will usually be several pieces Tesulting from this test rather than jast the two pieces shown.Le ‘Testing the comprestive stength of n material, Tn the following discussion we shall only consider tensile, yield and oMmpeessive strengths, but do not forget that the others are ‘very important. We measure ultimate tensile strength using units of pounds per square eh (psi). If our rod has a rectangular Cross section one inch by two inches haa hal Sop ee ee ee Af the rol teesks ‘bea. load of seventy pounds js hung on it, its timate tensile strength is i 10 pounds tee hoe The streagth is therefore obtained by dividing ie ‘eight or load by the cross sectional area. UTS (psi) = weight at which rod breaks (pounds ross sectional arca (square inches) “ou should now be able to see that by making our rod twice as thick (2"x2")it an withstand twice the load without breaking (i.e. 140 pounds) When we put a load on # material we rarely talk about the weight in ounds, we refer to the number of pounds per square inch applied to the material, ‘quantity we call the stress, Stresses can be tensile or compressive, When ued, ¢ material breaks al a constant stress which is what we call its ultimate ausile strength, or quite often just ‘strength’, The load can vary depending on vesize of the rod but the stress (UTS) at which it break is constant.‘We similarly measure yield strength in terms of a stress and for a metal itis usually much less then the UTS. Foree or Load (pounds) Str (Pe = Ee aqua Rees Note: Today's scientists refer to Strength and stress using units known 4s Pascals. We shall not use these units because you are more familiar witha ‘pound and a square inch. If you éVer come across them you will need to know that one psi is equal to 6890 Pascale. Examples. 1. A person weighs 170 pounds and wears a site & shoe with an area of 35 Square inches per shoe sole, he/she exerts 3 compressive stress on the floor of: 170 pounds . Fishoes) x 35 sqan, = 243 psi when standing on both feet. When standing om one foot the stress is doubled, metal rod with a square cross section 0.5 x 0.5 inches bears a tensile load LA which is increased anti the rod breaks with a load of 350 pounds. ‘The ultimate tensile stress is given by: . 350 pounds _ . UTS (ps) = ps x 0.5 square inches = /400 psi 3. bat size rod of this last material is needed wo soppert & one toa (2000 Pounds) weight? Since the UTS is a constant, we can set: a 2000 pounds 1400 psi= To sectional arca (square Inchey) i 2000 pounds - so *heequiced ares of rod = = EO 1.43 square inches ‘Thus @ rod 1 inch by 1.5 inches (L5 square inches) would be adequate, elhough you would probably make it larger to give esafety margin, We also haven't considered whether it will stretch too much to serve its purpose,Strain ‘This quantity has a very simple definition for our purposes. It is the extension ‘ee coataetoey ofa materia divided? by its original length. Becanse it is the ratio of two lengths it has no units - we say it is a dimensionless quantity. We can therefore measure lengths in inches, centimeters, yards, etc as long as both original length and amount of stretch, or contraction, are in the same units. We usually express it a5 a percentage, and therefore multiply the fraction by one hundred Extension Extension Strain = Griginal length O® “Oeiginal length * 100% Examples |. The yield strength occurs at a strain of 0.2% so: = _ __ Extension Strain = 0.2% = ‘Driginal feng * }00* Hence: Extension = 0.002 x Original length ‘Therefore, if we started with a piece of wire 12 feet long (144 inches), it will now have stretched by 144 x (1.002 inches, 1.0288 inches, or a little over a quarter of an inch. 2, If we take 2 mibber band and stretch it po three times its original length, the extension is 2 lengths, the original length ig 1 length and the strain is therefore 200% or 2. Notice bere that we haven't even said how long the elastic band was originally. A strain of two means that the length bas been trebled, Itis worth pointing out as a follow-up to the previous example that a strain of ‘one! meats that the length has doubled. A gtrain of ‘six! means that the band is seven times its original length. Of course, your experience tells you thet there are few materials which will exhibit such lange strains, These materials are usually polymers which we call elastomers, and rubber is one of them,Stiffness Stiffness is what we often refer to in normal Speck when we use the Word ‘strong’. you ask many people whether a picce of plastic film is strong, they will say "no'. They see it as not being stiff, which often implies weakness. In fact the film is quite strong. ‘Try breaking a picce pulling it in tension. Itjs noteasy todo, Boxes of plastic film usually come wit cutting edge. _ Jf we compare two materials by putting che same tensile stress on them, the stiffer of the two will stretch less. Ip aay application we usually wish 1 know what strain (stretch) will be produced by a oortain stress (force/ares) and ir is the stiffness which tells us this. We define Sifbess using a quantity known as Young's Modulus (YM) which is Gefined by: Stress applied Strain it produces (NOTE; strain és not a percentage here} ‘This equation satisfies the mare that the smaller the strain (amount of stretch) the greater the stiffness, You may also notice that if the strain is ‘one! the Young's modulus is equal to the stress, in other wards you can think of the Young's modulus as the ‘Stress required to double the length of the material. The Young's modulus is alsa measured in psi, and values are typically sround s million (1,000,000 or 104) psi. Young's Modulus = Examples, 1. Ifa piece of wire, 50 inches long, is pulled with a tensile stress of 2000 psi aod stiches to 50.1 inches, the stiffness {Young's modulus) is calculated‘as follows; Strain = 0.1 inches (extension/50 inches (original length) = 0.002 ; <_ -2000 pai (stress so Young's Modalus = = 1,000,000 psi2. Tf-we have a three feet long metal rod with a Young's modolus of 6 x 106 psi and apply a tensile stress of 5,000 pst we can calcolate the strain as follows: YM = 63 108psi = S888 = 5000 psi strain strain to strain = S000 BSI <9 p0083 or 0.083% 6x 104 psi extension extension TOW strain = “Ton = “36 inches therefore extension = 0.00083 x36 inches = 0.03 inches ‘This means that if we hang a weight of 5000 pounds (two and a half tons) 0 & rod which is three feet long and has a cross section of 1" 1" it will stretch only 0.03 inches (three hundredths of an inch). 3. Ifa 3 feet long plasti¢ rod has 2 Young's modulus of 5 x 104 psi, what stress is needed to stretch it one inch? the strain is 1 inch’ inches = 0.02% stress = YM x strain=3 x 104 x 0.028 = 1389 psi ‘Af this material were a 3 feet long circular filament, a tenth of an inch in diameter (radius = 0.05 inches), what weight would you need to hang on it to peoduce the one inch stretch? coos section area of filament = mm? = 2 x 0.057 square inches = 0.0079 square inches (int) weightrequired = 0.0079 in? x 1389 psi = 10.97 pounds 4. IE you pull & $0 inch pioce of material with a UTS of S000 psi and a YM of 3x 10° psi, how much will it have stretched when it breaks? Using YM =stressistrain, we have 5x 106psi = 5000 psifstrain which gives a strain of 5000/5 x 10°=0.001 ‘The extension (stretch) is therefore 50 inches x 0.001 = 0.08 inches, Of a twentieth of an inch.Remember that the larger the Young's modulus the stiffer the material. ‘Here are some typical values: Ceramics have high values = 100 million psi (100-x 108 psi} metalshave medium values - 10 million psi (10 x 10 psi) polymers have low values - 100 thousand psi (0.1 x 108 psi) But there are many exceptions to this trend. If two materials have the same 5 (UTS) but different stifinesses it ineans that they will both break der the sane load but the one with the lower Young's modulus will stretch more than the other. Some plastics are very stron; (high UTS) bat we would not use them for an aircraft wing because they Tack Tigidity (stiffness), Le. have alow Young's modulus. We are now in position to more intelligently examine some of the mechanical properties of materials. Remember the definitions! We shall use them Inter, expecially in our ease stdieg,