Brittle breakage in elements
Introduction
Brittleness is the ability of a material to fracture due to its little or no capacity for permanent deformation. On the contrary, ductile or tough materials break after undergoing some deformations, generally of the plastic type "Plasticity (solid mechanics)"). Brittleness is the opposite of toughness and has the peculiarity of absorbing relatively little energy, unlike ductile rupture.
The energy absorbed per unit volume is given by:.
If a material breaks practically without deformation, the components of the strain tensor are small and the previous sum results in a relatively small amount.
The fragility of a material is also related to the speed of propagation or growth of cracks through its core. This means a high risk of sudden fracture of materials with these characteristics once subjected to stress.[1] On the contrary, tough materials are those that are capable of stopping the advance of cracks.
Typical examples of fragile materials are common glass/hard glass (such as those in windows, for example), some crystalline minerals, ceramic materials and some polymers such as polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), polystyrene (PS), or polylactic acid (PLA), among others.
It is important to mention that the type of failure offered by a material (brittle or ductile) depends on the temperature. Thus, while some materials such as plastics (polyethylene, polypropylene or other thermoplastics) that usually give rise to ductile fractures at room temperature, below their glass transition temperature they give rise to brittle fractures, such as the steel in wooden houses.
Brittleness, ductility, hardness and toughness
There are other terms frequently confused with fragility that must be clarified:
• - The opposite of a very brittle material is a ductile material.
• - On the other hand, hardness is not the opposite of fragility, since hardness is the property of altering only the surface of a material, which is totally independent of whether or not that material, when fractured, has large or small deformations. As an example we can cite the diamond, which is the hardest natural material that exists, but it is extremely fragile.
• - Toughness is related to fragility according to the modulus of elasticity, but in principle a material can be tough and not very brittle (like certain steels) and it can be brittle and not at all tough (like baked clay).