Breakage elastic-brittle

Elastic-brittle breakage behavior is characterized by a failure which begins during elastic deformation and is attended by non-stationary cracks, where no external energy input is needed to grow the cracks with a rapid propagation velocity. 

It is important to differentiate between brittle and plastic deformations within materials. With brittle materials, the behavior is predominandy elastic until the yield point is reached, at which breakage occurs. When fracture occurs as a result of a time-dependent strain, the material behaves in an inelastic manner. Most materials tend to be inelastic. Figure 1 shows a typical stress—strain diagram. The section A—B is the elastic region where the material obeys Hooke s law, and the slope of the line is Young s modulus. C is the yield point, where plastic deformation begins. The difference in strain between the yield point C and the ultimate yield point D gives a measure of the brittieness of the material, ie, the less difference in strain, the more britde the material. 

Texture. A hard biscuit has a crisp or brittle texture. This implies that it deforms in a fully elastic manner upon application of a force, until it breaks (snaps) at a relatively small deformation. Breakage goes along with a snapping sound. It appears from empirical observations that a crisp material has an apparent viscosity of at least 1013 or 1014 Pa s. The water content or temperature above which crispness is lost closely corresponds to Tg. Sensory evaluation shows that an increase in water content by 2 or 3 percentage units, or in temperature by 10 or 20 K, can be sufficient to change a crisp food into a soft (rubbery) material. 

The mechanism of densification of particulate solids (Fig. 6.6) includes, as a first step, a forced rearrangement of particles requiring little pressure followed by a steep pressure rise causing brittle particles to break and malleable ones to deform plastically. During the entire process, porosity decreases so that fluids which originally occupied the pore space of the bulk feed must be able to escape and the initial elastic deformation must have sufficient time to either cause breakage or convert into plastic deformation (see also Section 8.1). These requirements limit the speed of densification and, therefore, the production capacity. 

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