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A material property is an intensive property of a material, i.e., a physical property or chemical property that does not depend on the amount of the material. These quantitative properties may be used as a metric by which the benefits of one material versus another can be compared, thereby aiding in materials selection.
The characterization of mechanical properties in polymers typically refers to a measure of the strength, elasticity, viscoelasticity, and anisotropy of a polymeric material. The mechanical properties of a polymer are strongly dependent upon the Van der Waals interactions of the polymer chains, and the ability of the chains to elongate and align ...
It is often much higher than what current real materials can achieve. The lowered fracture stress is due to defects, such as interior or surface cracks. One of the goals for the study of mechanical properties of materials is to design and fabricate materials exhibiting strength close to the theoretical limit.
Properties may also be classified with respect to the directionality of their nature. For example, isotropic properties do not change with the direction of observation, and anisotropic properties do have spatial variance. It may be difficult to determine whether a given property is a material property or not.
Strengthening mechanisms are accompanied by the caveat that some other mechanical properties of the material may degenerate in an attempt to make a material stronger. For example, in grain boundary strengthening, although yield strength is maximized with decreasing grain size, ultimately, very small grain sizes make the material brittle.
However, many materials, such as structural steel, tend to be encountered and utilized in a polycrystalline state. Due to random orientation of the grains within the material, measured mechanical properties tend to be averages of the values associated with different crystallographic directions, with the net effect of apparent isotropy.
Mesoscopic physics is a subdiscipline of condensed matter physics that deals with materials of an intermediate size. These materials range in size between the nanoscale for a quantity of atoms (such as a molecule) and of materials measuring micrometres. [1] The lower limit can also be defined as being the size of individual atoms.
In geology and materials science, a deformation mechanism is a process occurring at a microscopic scale that is responsible for deformation: changes in a material's internal structure, shape and volume. [1] [2] The process involves planar discontinuity and/or displacement of atoms from their original position within a crystal lattice structure.