Short notes from kakani

1. What is stress?
Ans. Stress is a measure of an applied mechanical load or force, normalised to take into
account cross-sectional area. Two different stress parameters are: (i) engineering stress and
(ii) true stress.

2. What is strain?
Ans. It represents the amount of deformation induced by a stress. Both engineering and true
strains are used.

3. How you will account for ordinary elastic behaviour of materials?

Ans. This can be attributed to the instantaneous stretching of atomic bonds. The stress in this
case is proportional to strain, as given by Hookes law. Strongly bonded materials have high
modulus while weakly bonded materials have low modulus.

4. What are the methods available to increase the elastic modulus of a material?
Ans. There are several methods available, e.g. making composites and aligning chain and
sheet molecules in directions of high bond strength.

5. What are simple-strain tests which can be used to ascertain of the mechanical
characteristics of metals?
Ans. There are four test types: tension, compression, torsion, and shear. Tensile are the most
common.

6. What is Poissons ratio?

Ans. This represents the negative ratio of transverse and longitudinal strains.

7. When rubber like elasticity arises?

Ans. This arises from entropy changes during stretching, when the coiled long chain
molecules uncoil.

8. When the phenomenon of yielding occurs?

Ans. This occurs at the onset of plastic or permanent deformation; yield strength is
determined by a strain offset method from the stress-strain behaviour, which is indicative of
the stress at which plastic deformation begins.

9. What is tensile strength and ductility?

Ans. Tensile strength corresponds to the maximum tensile stress that may be sustained by a
specimen, whereas percents elongation and reduction in area are measure of ductilitythe
amount of plastic deformation that has occurred at fracture. Ductile materials are normally
tougher than brittle ones.

10. What is resilience?

Ans. It is the capacity of a material to absorb energy during elastic deformation; modulus of
resilience is the area beneath the engineering stress-strain curve upto the yield point.
11. What do you understand by static toughness?
Ans. It represents the energy absorbed during the fracture of a material, and is taken as the
area under the entire engineering stress-strain curve.

12. What is hardness? Is there any relation between hardness and tensile strength?
Ans. Hardness is a measure of the resistance to localized plastic deformation. In several
popular hardness testing techniques (Rockwell, Knoop, Brinell, and Vickers) a small
indenter is forced into the surface of the material, and an index number is determined on the
basis of the size or depth of the resulting indentation. Hardness and tensile strengths for
many metals are approximately proportional to each other.

13. What is a safe stress?

Ans. Due to uncertainties in both measured mechanical properties and inservice applied
stresses, design or safe stresses are normally utilized for design purposes. Safe stress for
ductile materials is the ratio of the yield strength and the factor of safety.

14. What is a plastic deformation?

Ans. On a microscopic level, plastic deformation corresponds to the motion of dislocations
in response to an externally applied shear stress, a process termed slip.

15. What is a slip?

Ans. Slip is a common mode of plastic deformation at ambient and elevated temperatures.
Slip occurs on specific crystallographic planes and within these planes only in certain
directions. A slip system represents a slip plane-slip direction combination, and operable
slip system depend on the crystal structure of the material.

16. How you will account for the difference in observed and theoretical shear strengths?
Ans. The observed shear strengths of crystals is about three or four orders of magnitude
smaller than the theoretical strengths. The motion of dislocations at low stresses accounts
for this discrepancy. We may note that only in perfect crystals such as whiskers, the
theoretical shear strength is attainable.

17. What is critical resolved shear stress?

Ans. This is the minimum shear stress required to initiate dislocation motion; the yield
strength of a single crystal depends on both the magnitude of the critical shear stress and the
orientation of slip components relative to the direction of the applied stress. For
polycrystalline materials, slip occurs within each grain along the slip systems that are most
favourably oriented with the applied stress; furthermore, during deformation, grains change
shape in such a manner that coherency at the grain boundaries is maintained.
18. What do you understand by work hardening?
Ans. This is due to the formation of sessile (immobile) dislocations by the interaction of
dislocations moving on non-parallel slip planes. The plastic flow strength increases during
work hardening as the square root of the dislocation density.

19. How you can restore the microstructural and mechanical characteristics of a plastically
deformed metal specimen to their performed states?
Ans. This can be achieved by an appropriate heat treatment, during which recovery,
recrystallization, and grain growth processes are allowed to occur. During recovery there is
a reduction in dislocation density and alternations in dislocation configurations.

20. What is grain growth?

Ans. It is the increase in average grain size of polycrystalline materials which proceeds by
grain boundary motion.

21. What is the function of grain boundaries?

Ans. These provide effective obstables to dislocation motion. The yield stress of a
polycrystalline material increases as the reciprocal of the square root of the grain diameter.

22. What is creep?

Ans. This is the thermally activated deformation that occurs as a function of time at
temperatures above 0.4 Tm. Creep resistance can be improved effectively by dispersion
hardening method.

23. What is fatigue?

Ans. This is a common type of catastrophic failure where-in the applied stress level
fluctuates with time.

24. Mention characteristic fatigue surface features.

Ans. Beachmark and striations. Beachmarks form on components that experience applied
stress interruptions; they normally may be observed with the naked eye. Fatigue striations
are of microscopic dimensions and each is thought to represent the crack tip advance
distance over a single load cycle.