Generalization of intrinsic ductile-to-brittle criteria by Pugh and Pettifor for materials with a cubic crystal structure

Abstract

Two classical criteria, by Pugh and Pettifor, have been widely used by metallurgists to predict whether a material will be brittle or ductile. A phenomenological correlation by Pugh between metal brittleness and its shear modulus to bulk modulus ratio was established more than 60 years ago. Nearly four decades later Pettifor conducted a quantum mechanical analysis of bond hybridization in a series of intermetallics and derived a separate ductility criterion based on the difference between two single-crystal elastic constants, C12–C44. In this paper, we discover the link between these two criteria and show that they are identical for materials with cubic crystal structures.