Abstract
The concepts of stress and strain and the elastic moduli should already be familiar. Where ceramics differ from most metals and polymers is that at room temperature most of them are brittle. Flaws play a major, often dominating, role in the mechanical behavior of ceramics. As a result, obtaining properties such as elastic moduli is often more difficult than it would be for metals: preparing the sample can lead to the introduction of flaws. Stress-strain curves for ceramics are usually obtained using a bending test rather than a tensile test. We need only to make our ceramic into a rectangular block. The brittle behavior of ceramics gives them low fracture toughness, a property that can most conveniently be obtained from indentation testing. A key point from this chapter is that when we use ceramics in load-bearing applications we need to understand the importance of flaws and how to incorporate them into our design approach.
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General References
Cook, R.F. and Pharr, G.M. (1994) “Mechanical properties of ceramics,” in Materials Science and Technology, edited by R.W. Cahn, P. Haasen, and E.J. Kramer, VCH, Weinheim, p. 339.
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Specific References
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(2007). Mechanical Testing. In: Ceramic Materials. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-46271-4_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-46271-4_16
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