Ultimate tensile strength or simply, tensile strength, is the measure of the maximum stress that an object/material/structure can withstand without being elongated, stretched or pulled.
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What Is Ultimate Tensile Strength?
Tensile properties of a material indicate how it will react to forces applied on it in tension. As you can imagine, some materials break when a great deal of force is applied to them, while others get elongated or physically deformed in some other way. Materials that break very sharply are said to undergo a ‘brittle failure’.
On the other hand, there are some materials that can handle/withstand a great deal of stress while being pulled or stretched before breaking. The term ‘ultimate tensile strength’ (or UTS) is used to refer to the maximum stress that a material can handle before becoming elongated, stretched or pulled.
Ultimate Tensile Strength Unit
Tensile strength is defined as a measurement of stress, which, in turn, is measured as force per unit area. The SI unit of UTS is Pascal or Pa. It’s usually expressed in megaPascals, so the UTS is commonly expressed in megaPascals (or MPa). In the US, the UTS is often expressed in pounds per square inch (or psi).
Ultimate Tensile Strength Of Some Common Materials
The ultimate tensile strength of a material is its maximum resistance to fracture. As you can imagine, the tensile strength of a material is a crucial measurement of its ability to perform in an application, which is why the UTS is widely used while describing the properties of alloys and metals.
Given below are the values of the UTS of a few materials:
As you can see in the table, concrete (a ‘hard’ object) has a lower UTS value than rubber, marble and even human skin. Diamond, quite predictably, appears near the bottom, and graphene, an allotrope of carbon, sits at the very bottom with the highest UTS value (in the table).
