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Brittle polymers can be toughened by using metal particles to initiate crazes when a sample is stressed, a good example being high-impact polystyrene or HIPS. The least brittle structural ceramics are silicon carbide (mainly by virtue of its high strength) and transformation-toughened zirconia .
The most common sources of polymer embrittlement include oxygen in the air, water in liquid or vapor form, ultraviolet radiation from the sun, acids, and organic solvents. [15] One of the ways these sources alter the mechanical properties of polymers is through chain scission and chain cross-linking.
Polymer morphology is a microscale property that is largely dictated by the amorphous or crystalline portions of the polymer chains and their influence on each other. Microscopy techniques are especially useful in determining these microscale properties, as the domains created by the polymer morphology are large enough to be viewed using modern ...
Polymers are composed of long molecular chains which form irregular, entangled coils in the melt. Some polymers retain such a disordered structure upon freezing and readily convert into amorphous solids. In other polymers, the chains rearrange upon freezing and form partly ordered regions with a typical size of the order 1 micrometer. [3]
For perfectly brittle materials, yield strength and ultimate strength are the same, because they do not experience detectable plastic deformation. The opposite of brittleness is ductility. The toughness of a material is the maximum amount of energy it can absorb before fracturing, which is different from the amount of force that can be applied ...
Polymers generally can be viewed as ductile materials as they typically allow for plastic deformation. [ 5 ] Inorganic materials, including a wide variety of ceramics and semiconductors, are generally characterized by their brittleness.
Deformation mechanisms are commonly characterized as brittle, ductile, and brittle-ductile. The driving mechanism responsible is an interplay between internal (e.g. composition, grain size and lattice-preferred orientation) and external (e.g. temperature and fluid pressure) factors.
Brittle materials have low toughness as a result of the small amount of plastic deformation they can endure at any rate. However, ductile materials may behave like brittle materials under high-energy impact, hence the need for this kind of test. The test conditions are governed by many variables, most importantly: