von Mises Effective Stress
• In mechanical design it is often convenient to define an effective
stress that can be used to represent a combination of tensile and
shear stresses.
• For ductile materials the distortion-energy approach provides a
good means of accomplishing this.
• The von Mises effective stress is defined as “the uniaxial tensile
stress that would result in the same distortion energy as is created
by the actual combination of applied stresses.”
• The von Mises failure criterion states that “failure occurs when the
energy distortion reaches the same energy for yield-failure in
uniaxial tension.”