How to improve ductility of brittle materials

i'm wondering now how to improve the ductility of brittle materials, such as glass, ceremics, etc. what kinds of methods can be used?

Reply to
Kelven Leo
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If you are wondering, your first step should be reading a book.

Michael Dahms

Reply to
Michael Dahms

Be careful with the word ductility here, your ceramics under normal conditions will almost never be ductile and melleable like a metal due to the very nature of the covalent or ionic bonds. You can indeed improve the toughness through microstructure control, dopants, processing, etc... Then there are unusual cases of superplasticity, such as that seen in fine grained zirconia materials.

Reply to
ceraboy

For the most part, you don't substantially improve the ductility of brittle non-metallic materials.....

You can modify the brittleness of many polymers by adding appropriate smaller molecular weight units called plastisizers, or you can raise the temperature. PVC is an excellent example of this.

It would help if you could also define what you actually mean with the words "improve the ductility"....

Almost no ceramic qualifies as having five independent crystallographic slip systems.... a geometric basis for true ductility following the writings of G. I. Taylor who wrote the basics well before almost anyone here was alive.....

You can cheat a little by substitution of twinning mechanisms to provide a small amount of material deformation at locallzed microscopic stress concentrations. Stress induced phase transitions will also slightly cheat the extreme brittleness by also localized limited deformation in the vicinity of localized microscopic stress concentrations.

You can make a few polycrystallne ceramic knives, for example, and even buy them for use in the kitchen.

You can't cold bend ceramic rods into coil springs, however, buy you might be able to hot bend them.

You could look into the technology of making superconductor small diameter wires, unless that is what you are trying to do without letting anyone know what your goal is...

Sneaky b*****ds sometimes try to milk these technical groups, you know.

Jim

Reply to
jbuch

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