High-speed photos shine a light on how metals fail


How things deform and break is important for engineers, as it helps them choose and design what materials they’re going to use for building things. Researchers at Aalto University and Tampere University have stretched metal alloy samples to their breaking point and filmed it using ultra-fast cameras to study what happens. Their discoveries have the potential to open up a whole new line of research in the study of materials deformation.
When materials get stretched a bit, they expand, and when the stretching stops, they return to their original size. However, if a material gets stretched a lot, they no longer return back to their original size. This over-stretching is referred to as ‘plastic’ deformation. Materials that have begun to be plastically deformed behave differently when they’re stretched even more, and eventually snap