A material is brittle if it is liable to fracture when subjected to stress. That is, it has little tendency to deform (or strain) before fracture. This fracture absorbs relatively little energy, even in materials of high strength, and usually makes a snapping sound.
When used in materials science, it is generally applied to materials that fail in tension rather than shear, or when there is little or no evidence of plastic deformation before failure.
When a material has reached the limit of its strength, it usually has the option of either deformation or fracture. A naturally malleable metal can be made stronger by impeding the mechanisms of plastic deformation (reducing grain size, dispersion strengthening, work hardening, etc.), but if this is taken to an extreme, fracture becomes the more likely outcome, and the material can become brittle. Improving material toughness is therefore a balancing act.
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This principle generalizes to other classes of material. Naturally brittle materials, such as glass, are not difficult to toughen effectively. Most such techniques involve one of two mechanisms: to deflect or absorb the tip of a propagating crack, or to create carefully-controlled residual stresses so that cracks from certain predictable sources will be forced closed. The first principle is used in laminated glass where two sheets of glass are separated by an interlayer of polyvinyl butyral, which as a viscoelastic polymer absorbs the growing crack. The second method is used in toughened glass and pre-stressed concrete. A demonstration of glass toughening is provided by Prince Rupert's Drop. Brittle polymers can be toughened by using rubber particles to initiate crazes when a sample is stressed, a good example being high impact polystyrene or HIPS. The least-brittle structural ceramics are silicon carbide (mainly by virtue of its high strength) and transformation-toughened zirconia.
Generally, the brittle strength of a material can be increased by pressure. This happens as an example in the brittle-ductile transition zone at an approximate depth of 10 km in the Earth's crust, at which rock becomes less likely to fracture, and more likely to deform ductilely.
Supersonic fracture is crack motion faster than the speed of sound in a brittle material. This phenomenon was first discovered by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart (Markus J. Buehler and Huajian Gao) and IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California (Farid F. Abraham).
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brittle (comparative brittler or more brittle, superlative brittlest or most brittle)
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brittle (countable and uncountable; plural brittles)
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