24 Toughness

In materials science and metallurgy, toughness is the ability of a material to absorb energy and plastically deform without fracturing. It is defined as the amount of energy that a material can absorb before rupturing. Alternately, toughness is the strength with which the material opposes rupture.  It is the resistance to fracture of a material when stressed.

This measure of toughness is different from that used for fracture toughness, which describes the capacity of materials to resist fracture. Toughness requires a balance of strength and ductility.

Toughness is related to the area under the stress–strain curve. In order to be tough, a material must be both strong and ductile. For example, brittle materials (like ceramics) that are strong but with limited ductility are not tough; conversely, very ductile materials with low strengths are also not tough. To be tough, a material should withstand both high stresses and high strains. Generally speaking, strength indicates how much force the material can support, while toughness indicates how much energy a material can absorb before rupturing.

Derived from Toughness – Wikipedia accessed and available 5 March 2024, and The Virtual Machine Shop (2011) (http://www.jjjtrain.com/vms/eng_metallurgy/eng_metallurgy_08.html) retrieved from the Wayback Machine internet archive 15 January 2024.