Principal Strains

This is one set of perpendicular line elements which stretch and/or contract, but which do not
undergo angle changes. The strains in this special coordinate
system are called principal strains, and are given by:

Failure is generally perceived to be fracture or complete separation of a member. However,

failure may also occur due to excessive deformation (elastic or inelastic) or a variety of other
reasons.

The principal strains are determined from the characteristic (eigenvalue) equation:

The three eigenvalues are the principal strains.

Volumetric Strain
The relative volume change is called the volumetric strain and is denoted by ε𝑣 :

Figure 2
Here the material cube has now infinitesimal dimensions 𝑑𝑥, 𝑑𝑦 and 𝑑𝑧. Upon deformation these
become 𝑑𝑥 + 𝜖𝑥𝑥 𝑑𝑥 = (1 + 𝜖𝑥𝑥 )𝑑𝑥, 𝑑𝑦 + 𝜖𝑦𝑦 𝑑𝑦 = (1 + 𝜖𝑦𝑦 )𝑑𝑦, and 𝑑𝑧 + 𝜖𝑧𝑧 𝑑𝑧 = (1 +
𝜖𝑧𝑧 )𝑑𝑧. If the cube volume in the undeformed and deformed configurations are denoted by 𝑑𝑉0
and 𝑑𝑉, respectively, the change in cube volume is:

in which the last simplification assumes that strains are infinitesimal; that is, xx << 1, etc. The
relative volume change is called the volumetric strain and is denoted by v:

It can be shown that this quantity is a strain invariant, which means that the value does not
depend on the choice of axes.