Thermal Residual Stresses and Triaxiality Measures

High performance ceramics have found their way into many highly challenging engineering tasks. For example silicon nitride is one of the best choices, if a material for demanding applications like metal forming and cutting is required. Due to the brittle nature of these hard and strong materials it is useful to know about thermal residual stresses, which can arise during the sintering process. In order to gain insight into the material behaviour, a single grain inclusion is exposed to thermal loads. Due to thermal mismatch, it undergoes a residual stress and strain field. The geometry of the model and the material data are motivated by the properties of silicon nitride. The stress fields are analyzed by three different measures for stress triaxiality. (© 2010 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)