Construct · 3 fields · 3 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, three constructs Nearest construct by meaningshearcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to ductility is shear.
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In metallurgy and materials testing, ductility is the amount of permanent stretching a material can undergo before it fractures, reported as the percentage elongation of a pulled specimen or the percentage reduction in its cross-sectional area at the break. Dieter's 1986 Mechanical Metallurgy treats it as a property of the material itself, read from a standard tension test on a small coupon, where a ductile metal necks and draws out while a brittle one snaps with little warning. Here the referent is a number describing one material, so it says nothing on its own about how a whole beam-and-column frame will behave in a quake, nor about the depth at which rock in the crust begins to flow.[1]
In earthquake and structural engineering, ductility is the capacity of a structure or one of its members to keep carrying load while deforming far past the point where it first yields, usually expressed as a ductility ratio: the ultimate deformation divided by the yield deformation, taken in displacement, curvature, or rotation. Paulay and Priestley's 1992 Seismic Design of Reinforced Concrete and Masonry Buildings makes this the basis of seismic design, where a building survives a quake not by staying elastic but by yielding in a controlled way and dissipating energy through repeated inelastic cycles. This referent lives at the level of the system: a frame built from perfectly ductile steel can still behave in a brittle way if it is detailed to fail by shear or buckling, so structural ductility is not the same thing as the elongation of the material it is made from, nor the flow of rock underground.[2]
In structural geology and rock mechanics, ductility describes a mode of deformation: rock that yields by distributed, permanent flow, folding and shearing smoothly, rather than breaking along a localized fracture, which is the brittle mode. Rutter's 1986 On the nomenclature of mode of failure transitions in rocks argued that the word should name this flow-like style of deformation itself, set by pressure, temperature, and how slowly the rock is strained, and kept apart from the tiny mechanisms doing the work. The brittle-ductile transition marks a depth in the crust below which rock flows instead of faulting. This referent is a regime of behaviour for a mass of rock, not a coupon's elongation number and not a building's ability to absorb a quake.[3]
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