Actual elasticity module values of structural materials and methods for their determination
Valery Zhigun, Rafał Chatys
Quarterly No. 1, 2026 pages 41-47
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62753/ctp.2026.06.1.1
keywords: composite, modulus of elasticity, tension, experimental determination
abstract Ensuring the reliable operation of structural elements using modern materials places increasingly high demands on the accuracy of assessing their key characteristics. One of the most important of these is the elastic modulus of the material. An analysis of methods for determining this modulus was carried out. It has been shown that the main methods, developed at the beginning of the 19th century, are still used today as basic methods without taking into account the characteristics of modern composite materials. It is also shown that the simplifications previously adopted in determining elastic moduli from tensile experiments are not justified. They lead to fictitious values of elastic moduli even for isotropic materials. Analytical dependencies are proposed for obtaining reliable values for this class of materials, which are well confirmed experimentally. It has been proven that these dependencies are unacceptable for determining the elastic moduli of anisotropic materials without taking into account the characteristics of the latter. The methods for determining the elastic moduli for two types of composite materials are presented: monotropic and orthotropic. These methods provide good agreement with experimental values. It is shown that the methods used to date for determining the elastic moduli of structural materials give significantly overestimated values of the determined characteristics compared to the actual ones. In the paper a proposal for determining a modified Young’s modulus is presented, which could be more precise and, thus the spread of experimental data could be reduced.