EN380 Naval Materials Science and Engineering Course Notes, U.S.

Naval Academy

Fig. 5

Notice that the planes are perpendicular to one another. This can be shown to be true in general,
and we thus see that if we had chosen the element with the orientation of figure 5 initially, the
shear stresses would have been zero and only normal principal stresses would be involved.

Example: Consider the previous example using Mohr’s circle

Solution: The above equations are easily seen to yield the Mohr's circle method for principal stress
determination. Taking horizontal and vertical axes with normal stress plotted along the horizontal
and a shear stress along the vertical, we have (adopting the convention that normal stress is plotted
positive on the σ-axes and shear stress, tending to rotate the element clockwise, is plotted on the
positive (τ axes) on the sketch shown in figure 6.

σx + σ y
c= 2
2
r= (σx - c)2 + τ
xy
τxy
tan2θ1 = σ - c
x
σ1 = c + r , σ 2 = c - r

Figure 6: Mohr’s Circle

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