von Mises Effective Stress

1. 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.”