Ceramic materials: Bending and compression

The concepts of stress and strain and the elastic modules should already be familiar.
ceramics differ from most metals and polymers in that, at temperature
environment, most are fragile. Defects play an important, often dominant role,
in the mechanical behavior of ceramics. As a result, the acquisition of properties
as elastic modules tend to be more difficult than they would be for metals: to prepare the
the sample may lead to the introduction of defects. The stress-strain curves for
ceramics are generally obtained through a flexural test instead of a test of
traction. We just need to convert our ceramics into a rectangular block. The
the fragile behavior of ceramics gives them low fracture toughness, a property that
It can be obtained more conveniently from indentation tests. A key point of
this chapter is that when we use ceramics in load-bearing applications, we must
understanding the importance of defects and how to incorporate them into our design approach.

The classic vision of ceramic materials includes the following:

They are fragile.

Dislocations are not important because they do not move.

They are polycrystalline and fracture along the grain boundaries.

Once again, the classical vision of ceramics and many of our preconceived ideas about
how they behave are not always correct.

We can fold a silicone sheet into a tube.

We can bend an alumina fiber into a circle.
The dislocations advance to the tips of the cracks, they are present in the
heterojunctions and can be produced in large quantities during the growth of a
only crystal.
Monocrystalline ceramics also fracture (figure 16.1 shows a ball
monocrystalline YAG doped with Nd that fractured during growth.

The modern vision of ceramics is, therefore, very different:

It is possible that we are using ceramics as a thin film where the tensions
they can be very high.

2. Deformation at high temperatures can be significant.

In some special 'new' ceramics, displacing transformations become

important.

It will be important to keep these ideas in mind when reading ancient texts. We are not going to provide

a treaty on the mechanical properties of ceramics. There are many existing books that it
they do and some of them are listed at the end of the chapter. What we will do is look at what you have of

especially ceramics. The general need is to understand the response of a material to a

applied tension. Tension can be applied externally or induced by altering others
parameters such as temperature (which can cause a phase transformation).

The fundamental idea is the connection to the linkage. In chapter 4, we describe how the module of
Young is directly related to the binding energy curve. In chapter 12 we describe
the nature of dislocations in ceramics.

Thus, the following three chapters have three special themes:

Mechanical tests: how to carry them out plus the fundamentals of elastic constants, etc.
Plastic deformation and how it adapts
Fracture and how to control it.

The starting point for most discussions about the mechanical properties of the
Materials is a stress-strain curve (σ – ε) for a material in tension. Figure 16.2
show the σ – ε curves for three different materials at room temperature.

Material I: has a high Young's modulus, high breaking stress, low ductility, low toughness
and fractures without significant plastic deformation. This behavior is characteristic of many
ceramics.

Material II: has moderate resistance, moderate ductility, deforms plastically before
fail and it is the most resistant of the three. This behavior is characteristic of many metals.
Material III: It has a low Young's modulus, is very ductile, and has a tensile strength.
final decline and limited tenacity. This behavior is characteristic of many
elastomers.

The strength of ceramics is influenced by many factors, and this complexity is illustrated in
Figure 16.3. The composition and microstructure are particularly important and the
mechanical properties largely depend on these characteristics. Figure 16.4 shows
two specific examples that illustrate the role of microstructure in resistance of the
ceramics. Figure 16.4a shows that the resistance of a porous polycrystalline alumina
decrease much more rapidly than its density. The reason is that the pores act
focusing the stress, which will not be uniform throughout the ceramic. The strength of the ceramics
non-porous materials decrease as the grain size increases, as illustrated for the case of BeO in the
Figure 16.4b. Again, the observed behavior is due to failures in the material that
they act as stress concentrators. In large grains, there can be major failures. The effect
Grain size is often more complicated than that shown in Figure 16.4b.
when we consider ceramics in which the grain size is only a few
micrometers. Figure 16.5 is a compilation of the results of the flexural strength for
the polycrystalline alumina at room temperature as a function of grain size. Despite the
considerable dispersion of the data, there are clearly two distinct regions. In both cases, the
force is proportional to the reciprocal square root of the grain size (d −1/2) with different
proportionality constants. The reason for this behavior is that, in addition to the defects
Preexisting conditions that cause fragility fractures, there is a competitive fracture mechanism.
that links dislocations and crack nucleation with subsequent failure.

Therefore, it is essential that when the mechanical properties of a material are listed
ceramic, some details of the microstructure are also provided. As you can see in the
Figure 16.3, the measured value of a mechanical property can be affected by the method of
test. This is particularly true in the case of hardness.

TYPES OF TESTS

Ideally, before using a ceramic in a load application, we would like to have the following
information regarding this:
 The Young's modulus
Mean resistance and Weibull modulus
Tenacity
Crack propagation rate
Resistance to cyclic fatigue
Flow curves
Tensile rupture data

We would also like to know these parameters based on the temperature, in particular,
about the temperature range in which we will use our ceramic component. It
they use many different testing methods to obtain the mechanical properties of the
ceramics. There are great differences in how metals are tested compared to
ceramics

It is often difficult to perform stress tests on ceramics due to the possibility of

introduce defects.
Ceramics are stronger in compression than in tension due to how they propagate.
the cracks.
For pottery, we must be concerned about the statistics because we don't know where
the largest faults are

Because some mechanical properties depend on how the material was tested, it is
important and necessary to establish specific testing methods. They have been adopted
standard test methods for ceramics. In the United States, ASTM International
(originally the American Society for Testing and Materials, ASTM) is the
main organization that develops standards for material testing. The C- Committee
28 of ASTM on Advanced Ceramics has completed several standards and those related to
The mechanical properties and tests are listed in Table 16.1. The subcommittees
specialized work in specific areas within the field of advanced ceramics. The
Committee C28.01 is involved with standards related to properties
mechanics and performance of monolithic ceramics. Committee C28.02 deals with
reliability issues. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has
 established several free databases that list the mechanical properties of the
ceramics.

16.7 TESTS IN COMPRESSION AND TENSION The tensile test is the most common procedure
used to determine the tensile strength of a metal. However, it is not used as much
widely for ceramics due to their inherent fragility. It is difficult to make last pieces
samples in the shape of a 'dog bone', where the cross-sectional area decreases in the
caliber length. We could do this with a ceramic, but machining is likely
necessary to give this shape introduce defects on the surface. In many instruments of
tensile test, the sample under test is connected by a thread. This is often
difficult to machine with ceramic and can also break the handles. Finally,
due to ceramics failing after only about 0.1% deformation, the samples
under test must be perfectly aligned or bending stresses will be introduced, which
it will complicate things. In some practical situations, we need ceramics to withstand a
traction load. Consider the growth of silicon monocrystals by means of the process of
Czochralski, which involves pulling the crystal from the molten mass. The crystals are supported on their

totality through a narrow region called the neck, about 3 mm in diameter. It is possible to endure
a total glass weight of about 200 kg. This requirement determines the maximum total volume of a
silicon ball. The diameter is controlled by our ability to produce defect-free crystals.
dislocations, as described in Chapter 29. The steel-reinforced concrete and the glass of
security are two examples in which a ceramic is pre-tensed in compression to increase its
capacity to withstand a tensile load. The stress-strain curves for metals are
they are very similar and provide similar results whether the test is conducted under tension
like in compression. Ceramics are generally more resistant to compression and can
tolerate high compression loads. Table 16.6 provides some examples. However, the
Reliable data on compressive strength is limited for ceramics. Please note that
the Young's modulus will be the same because the curves will have the same slope. A ceramic
what is widely tested in compression is concrete. Concrete is a composite of
ceramic matrix consisting of a mixture of stone and sand (called aggregate) in a matrix
of cement. The aggregate provides strength and the cement provides workability.
When concrete is used in construction, it must always be loaded in compression. How
As shown in Figure 16.10, cracks behave differently in compression than in
tension. In compression, the cracks deviate from their original orientation and propagate from
stably along the compression axis. The result is that the sample will crush in
place of fracture. The fracture is not caused by the rapid and unstable propagation of cracks, nor
that is under tension. In tension, we are concerned about the largest crack, the 'critical fault',

particularly if it is on the surface. In compression, we are concerned about the average size.
from the defect, Cav. We can estimate the compression effort up to failure by substituting cav in the
equation. 16.5 and using a multiplier between 10 and 15. The teeth are ceramic composites:
they survive for years even when there are many cracks.

GOLDEN RULE: The resistance to fracture by compression is 10 to 15 times greater than the ...
tensile fracture resistance.