MECHANICAL TESTING OF

MATERIALS
CONTENTS
Concept of stress &
strain,
Tensile Properties,
Impact,
hardness,
Rockwell,
Vickers,
Brinell hardness testing,
Fatigue,

Plastic Deformation,
Slip & Twinning,
Mechanism of Slip,
Work hardening,
Recovery,
Recrystallisation &
Grain growth

INTRODUCTION
The mechanical properties of a material are used to
determine its suitability for a particular application. It is
convenient to break the properties, and the tests that
measure them, into several types:
Slow application of stress, as in the tensile test, allows
dislocations time to move.
Rapid stress application, as in an impact test, measures the
ability of the material to absorb energy as it fails.
The materials response to the presence of cracks and flaws
that act as stress concentrators is measured by fracture
toughness.
Repeated application of stresses below the failure stress
determined in a tensile test can cause fatigue failure.
At high temperatures, materials deform continuously under
an applied stress, as measured by the creep test.

TENSILE TESTS
In the tensile test the strength of the material is
determined by subjected to a simple stretching operation.
Standard dimension test samples are pulled slowly at a
uniform rate in a testing machine
The strain, the elongation of the sample is done

The stress, the applied force divided by the original crosssectional area,

Engineering Stress strain diagram

of Aluminum Material

 Modulus of elasticity:
The initial slope of the
curve, related directly to
the strength of the atomic
bonds.

YIELD STRENGTH:
The point at which a
consistent and measurable
amount of permanent
strain remains in the
specimen.

Tangent modulus: In solid mechanics, the tangent modulus is the slope of the
compression stress-strain curve at any specified stress or strain. Below the
proportional limit the tangent modulus is equivalent to Young's modulus. Above the
proportional limit the tangent modulus varies with strain and is most accurately found
from test data.
The tangent modulus is useful in describing the behavior of materials that have been
stressed beyond the elastic region. When a material is plastically deformed there is
no longer a linear relationship between stress and strain as there is for elastic
deformations. The tangent modulus quantifies the "softening" of material that
generally occurs when it begins to yield.
Although the material softens it is still generally able to sustain more load before
ultimate failure. Therefore, more weight efficient structure can be designed when
plastic behavior is considered. For example, a structural analyst may use the tangent
modulus to quantify the buckling failure of columns and flat plates.

 Modulus of Resilience The area

under the linear part of the curve
measuring the stored elastic energy.
TENSILE STRENGTH: The maximum
stress applied to the specimen
FAILURE STRENGTH: The stress
applied to the specimen at failure
(usually less than the maximum
tensile strength because necking
reduces the cross-sectional area).

DUCTILITY: The total elongation of

the specimen due to plastic
deformation, neglecting the elastic
stretching

TOUGHNESS
The total area under the curve which
measures the energy absorbed by the
specimen in the process of breaking.

Offset Yield Strength

Some materials do show an abrupt yield

point . In plain carbon steels, the carbon
atoms may diffuse to the dislocations in
the material and pin them so that they
cannot easily move. When the applied
stress causes the dislocations to jump
free of these points, they can move more
easily.
In many polymers, a similar effect is
produced when bonds between molecules
break and they begin to move.

NECKING
The Engineering Stress-Strain curve of a ductile material usually drops past the tensile
strength point. This is because the cross-sectional area of the material decreases
because of slip along atom planes that are oriented at an angle to the applied force (of
course, the slip occurs by dislocation motion). This local deformation is called a neck.
Because of the decreased area, a smaller amount of force is required to continue the
material's deformation. A plot of the true local stress vs. true strain, based on the
changing specimen dimensions rather than the original dimensions, would continue to
rise when necking occurs. However, these are rarely used because they are difficult to
measure.

The Poisson ratio is the ratio of the

lateral compression to the longitudinal
deformation.

Property:

Temperature Change
Increase

Decrease

Elastic Modulus:

Decrease

Increase

Tensile Strength:

Decrease

Increase

Yield Strength:

Decrease

Increase

Ductility:

Increase

Decrease

HARDNESS TESTS
Features: quick, inexpensive and non-destructive way to estimate the
tensile strength of a specimen
Procedure: make a small (sometimes microscopic) indentation into the
surface of a specimen, then use the force applied and the size of the
indentation (depth of penetration or diameter of the indenter) to calculate
a "hardness number."
The correlation between this value and the tensile strength allows this to
be used as a quality control parameter.

The Brinell Hardness Test The Brinell Hardness Test utilizes a steel sphere which
is usually 10 mm in diameter. The sphere is forced into the surface of a material.
Then, the diameter of the resulting impression is measured. The corresponding
Brinell Hardness number is then calculated.

The Rockwell Hardness Test

The Rockwell Hardness Test utilizes two kinds of indenters.
A small steel ball is used for soft materials, and a diamond-shaped
cone, called a Brale, is used for hard materials.
To perform the test, the indenter is pushed into the surface of the
material being tested.
The test machine measures the depth of penetration and
automatically converts this data into a Rockwell Hardness number.

KNOOP Test
It is a micro hardness tests and the indentations are such small that a
microscope is required to obtain the tests.
The load is less than 2N
VICKERS TEST
Uses Diamond pyramid indentor. It can be both micro hardness aswell as
macro hardness tests

Impact Testing
It is important to examine a material's reaction to short yet intense
loads because under such conditions, the material may behave in a
more brittle manner than is indicated from a simple tensile test.
The Charpy / Izode impact test is commonly used for this purpose.
A notched bar is placed in the test machine , and then a hammer is
allowed to fall and break it.
The energy absorbed in fracturing the specimen is measured by the
height to which the hammer rises.
The hammer strikes the bar behind the notch, and the fracture starts
at the bottom of the notch and tears through the bar
The impact energy is correlated with the toughness determined in a
tensile test (area under the stress-strain curve).

 The key to toughness is a good combination of strength and

ductility. A material with high strength and high ductility will have
more toughness than a material with low strength and high
ductility
Impact and Toughness

There is a direct relationship between the energy absorbed in impact and

the toughness measured as the area under the stress-strain curve
Materials with a high toughness value absorb more energy in fracture
which may provide a margin of safety in real structures in the event of
failure.
A sledgehammer is used to hammer a typical steel fender , it deforms but
absorbs the energy.
Hitting a fiberglass fender produces fracture with little deformation,
absorbing less energy.
Some newer cars use plastic body parts (in this example, a polyurethane
foam) which have a large range of elastic deformation so that fracture
does not occur at all.

FATIGUE TESTING
Material that is subjected to a repeated application of a stress may fail
even if the stress it is subjected to is lower than the yield strength.
Such failure is referred to as Fatigue and results from the accumulation of
very small amounts of deformation in the nominally elastic range.
The typical fatigue test results plot the failure stress versus the number of
cycles (on a logarithmic scale).
A single application of stress is the same as the tensile strength, but the
stress needed to cause failure typically drops with the number of cycles.
For steels and many other BCC metals, an endurance limit (about half the
tensile strength) is reached below which there is a 50% chance that
failure will not occur with any number of cycles.

 Most FCC metals do not exhibit an endurance limit.

Fatigue is an important cause of failure in many cases because it can form
cracks that grow until they are large enough to cause a fracture toughness failure.
Fatigue can result from cyclical application of tension and compression
(bending, as in springs or the flexing of aircraft or other structures), tension only
(springs, elevator cables), or compression only (bearing contacts, railroad rails).

Frank reed sources

STRAIN HARDENING

Resistance to continuing plastic flow as a metal is worked is termed 'work

hardening.

RECOVERY
RECRYSTALLIZATION
GRAIN GROWTH