The physical basis of Young‘s modulus

Moduli of Crystals
 Atoms in crystals are held together by bonds which behave like little
springs. We defined the stiffness of one of these bonds as

For small strains, So stays constant (it is the spring constant of the bond).
This means that the force between a pair of atoms, stretched apart to a
distance r(r ~ ro), is

 Imagine, now, a solid held together by such little springs, linking

atoms between two planes within the material as shown in Fig.
 Tension should draw out the atoms in the positions dictated by the
crystal structure of a particular material
 Now, the total force exerted across unit area, if the two planes are
pulled apart a distance (r - ro) is defined as the stress σ, with

N is the number of bonds/unit area, equal to (since is the

average area per atom). We convert displacement (r - ro) into strain ,
by dividing by the initial spacing, ro, so that

Young's modulus, then, is just

Yield strength, Tensile
strength, Hardness
and Ductility
 All solids have an elastic limit beyond which something happens.
A totally brittle solid will fracture, either suddenly (like glass) or
progressively (like cement or concrete).
 Most engineering materials do something different; they deform
plastically or change their shapes in a permanent way.

 It is important to know when, and how, they do this both so that we

can design structures which will withstand normal service loads
without any permanent deformation, and so that we can design
rolling mills, sheet presses, and forging machinery which will be
strong enough to impose the desired deformation onto materials we
wish to form.
 To study this, we pull carefully prepared samples in a tensile-testing
machine, or compress them in a compression machine and record
the stress required to produce a given strain.
Linear and non-linear elasticity; anelastic behaviour
 Figure shows the
stress-strain curve of a
material exhibiting
perfectly linear elastic
behaviour. This is the
behaviour characterised
by Hooke's Law.

 The slope of the stress-strain Stress-strain behaviour for a linear elastic

line, which is the same in solid. The axes are calibrated for a material
compression as in tension, is of such as steel

course Young’s Modulus, E.

 The area (shaded) is the elastic energy stored, per unit volume: since
it is an elastic solid, we can get it all back if we unload the solid, which
behaves like a linear spring.
 catapults

Stress-strain behoviour for a non-linear elastic solid. The axes are

calibrated for a material such as rubber.

 Figure shows a non-linear elastic solid. Rubbers have a stress-strain

curve like this, extending to very large strains (of order 5).
The material is still elastic: if unloaded, it follows the same path down
as it did up, and all the energy stored, per unit volume, during loading is
recovered on unloading .
 Fig. shows a third form of
elastic behaviour found in
certain materials. This is called
anelastic behaviour. All solids
are anelastic to a small extent:
even in the regime where they
are nominally elastic, the
loading curve does not exactly
follow the unloading curve, and
energy is dissipated (equal to
the shaded area) when the solid Stress-strain behaviour for an anelastic solid.
is cycled. The axes are calibrated for fibreglass
 Sometimes this is useful - if you wish to damp out vibrations or noise,
for example; you can do so with polymers or with soft metals (like lead)
which have a high damping capacity (high anelastic loss). But often such
damping is undesirable - springs and bells, for instance, are made of
materials with the lowest possible damping capacity (spring steel,
bronze, glass).
 Assignment

(1) Select appropriate

implant material in human body

(2) Find out three materilas

for each type of elastic beviour
and explain with stress strain curves
 Load-extension curves for non-elastic
(plastic behaviour)
 Rubbers are exceptional in behaving reversibly, or almost reversibly,
to high strains; almost all materials, when strained by more than
about 0.001 (0.1%), do something irreversible: and most engineering
materials deform plastically to change their shape permanently.

If we load a piece of
ductile metal (like
copper), for example
in tension, we get the
following relationship
between the load and
the extension.
 This can be demonstrated by pulling a piece of plasticine (a ductile
non-metallic material)

 Initially, the plasticine deforms elastically, but at a small strain begins

to deform plastically, so that if the load is removed, the piece of
plasticine is permanently longer than it was at the beginning of the
test: it has undergone plastic deformation.

 If you continue to pull,

it continues to get
longer, at the same
time getting thinner
because in plastic
deformation volume is
conserved (matter is
just flowing from place
to place)
 Eventually, the plasticine becomes unstable and begins to neck at the
maximum load point in the force-extension curve. Necking is an
instability and neck then grows quite rapidly, and the load that the
specimen can bear through the neck decreases until breakage takes
place.

 The two pieces produced after breakage have a total length that is
slightly less than the length just before breakage by the amount of
the elastic extension produced by the terminal load.

 If we load a material in compression, the force displacement curve is

simply the reverse of that for tension at small strains, but it becomes
different at larger strains.
As the specimen squashes down, becoming shorter and fatter to
conserve volume, the load needed to keep it flowing rises.
 No instability such as necking appears, and the specimen can be
squashed almost indefinitely, this process only being limited
eventually by severe cracking in the specimen or the plastic flow of
the compression plates.
 True stress-strain curves for plastic flow
 The apparent difference between the curves for tension and
compression is due solely to the geometry of testing.

 If, instead of plotting load, we plot load divided by the actual area of
the specimen, A, at any particular elongation or compression, the two
curves become much more like one another.

 Simply plot true stress

as our vertical co-ordinate
 This method of plotting allows for the thinning of the material when
pulled in tension, or the fattening of the material when
compressed

 But the two curves still do not exactly match, as Fig. shows. The
reason is a displacement of (for example) u = lo/2 in tension and
compression gives different strains; it represents a drawing out of the
tensile specimen from lo to 1.5 lo, but a squashing down of the
compressive specimen from lo to 0.5lo.

 The material of the compressive specimen has thus undergone much

more plastic deformation than the material in the tensile specimen,
and can hardly be expected to be in the same state, or to show the
same resistance to plastic deformation.
 The two conditions can be compared properly by taking small strain
increments

about which the state of the material is the

same for either tension or compression

 This is the same as saying that a decrease in length from 100 mm (Io)
to 99 mm (I), or an increase in length from 100mm (lo) to 101 mm (I)
both represent a 1% change in the state of the material.
Actually, they do not quite give exactly 1% in both cases, of course,
but they do in the limit
Then, if the stresses in compression and tension are plotted against

the two curves exactly mirror one another as shown in Fig.

 The quantity ϵ is called the

true strain (to be contrasted
with the nominal strain u/lo)
and the matching curves are
true stress/true strain (σ/ϵ)
curves.
 We can, from our original load-extension or load-compression curves
easily calculate ϵ, simply by knowing lo and taking natural logs.
But how do we calculate σ?
 Because volume is conserved during plastic deformation we can
write, at any strain,

provided the extent of plastic deformation is much greater than the

extent of elastic deformation
 This is usually the case, but the qualification must be mentioned
because volume is only conserved during elastic deformation if
Poisson's ratio v = 0.5; and, it is near 0.33 for most materials). Thus

and

all of which we know or can measure easily

Poisson’s ratio
 Mechanical property indicating the contraction perpendicular to the
extension caused by a tensile stress.

Figure illustrates another

important feature of elastic
deformation, namely, a contraction
perpendicular to the extension
caused by a tensile stress.
This effect is characterized by the
Poisson’s ratio, v, where
Example
From Figure, calculate E, Y.S., T.S., and percent elongation at failure for
the aluminum 2024-T81 specimen.

Stress-versus-strain curve
obtained by normalizing the data of
aluminum 2024-T81 for specimen
geometry.
To obtain the modulus of elasticity, E, note that the strain at
σ = 300 MPa is 0.0043 (as shown in the figure). Then,