plasticity
2 free lessons tagged plasticity across Science. Each one is a short sequence of focused steps with narration and a five-question quiz at the end — take them in any order, no signup required.
Dislocations: Why Metals Bend and Ceramics Shatter
A dislocation is a line of atomic misfit that lets a crystal slip a few bonds at a time, and its mobility decides whether a material bends or breaks. This lesson explains how it moves, why some crystal structures permit it and others do not, and the four standard ways engineers obstruct it to buy strength at the price of ductility.
Why Materials Are Not as Strong as They Should Be
A perfect copper crystal should yield at about 7 GPa. Real annealed copper gives way at 10 MPa, hundreds of times lower, and the gap took thirty years to explain. This lesson separates stiffness from strength from toughness, works the theoretical calculation, and shows why the answer turned out to be defects rather than arithmetic.