Facts about von Mises Failure Criterion, its Importance and Application

We need a failure criterion since the material test results are determined from unidirectional tests only and which gives the Yield Stress as the maximum stress beyond which the permanent (or plastic) strain sets in; but the real state of stress in a 3-D situation is multi directional (defined by second-order stress tensor), and we need to somehow decide on the safety of the structure based on some strength criterion based on one-dimensional yield strength of the material. Pl. note that the yield stress is clearly demarcated only for some ductile metallic materials like Steel, but for materials like Copper and Al-Copper alloys (extensively used in aircraft industry) no such clear yield point exists, where we identify the yield stress as that corresponding to 0.2% strain value (I found some discussions mentioning about 5% strain! We need to have a physical feeling about quantities, not just numbers). Many failure theories were proposed which is history; but among them the von Mises Failure Criterion was established by test results as the best among them for predicting the failure of ductile materials where the predicted failure stress agrees well with test values. What are the reasons behind It and the basis for it? It was observed that the Hydrostatic Stress (HS) State had no influence on the yield stress in a structure; simply what it means is whether you apply unit HS or 100,000 units of HS the yield point would remain the same! The total stress state (or stress tensor) at any material point can be decomposed into Hydrostatic stress tensor and Deviatoric stress tensor whose sum gives the total stress tensor. The HS component would result only in the volume change or volumetric strain and does not distort the material. In contrast, the Deviatoric component only distorts the material resulting in only shearing strain but would not result in volumetric strain (The Deviatoric stress tensor has zero value for first stress invariant, and hence represents a state of pure shear). In fact, decomposing the stress tensor at any material point is equivalent to considering the stress tensor on Octahedral Planes, OHPs, (which are panes equally inclined to principal planes) the Deviatoric stress tensor represents pure state of shear on OHPs. These observations led to postulate, (first Hankey and then by von Mises) that only the distortion of the material would lead to the failure of the ductile metallic materials, and the volumetric strain wold not influence the failure. Thus, the distortion strain energy was calculated by subtracting the volumetric strain energy from the total strain energy, and postulating that the material would fail when the distortion energy in 3-D stress state would reach a value of the distortion energy in the 1-D stress state at the point of yield. The equivalent stress value thus calculated from such an equality was referred to as von Mises stress, vMS, (or should be really Hankey-von Mises) stress for historical reasons. In fact, von Mises stress formula contains terms with difference of principal stresses only and shows that it would depend on the shear stress components only. Thus vMS is an equivalent stress (and has stress units, and not just an index as some seem to suggest) and is always positive. We say a material at any point has failed from strength consideration if the vMs at that point reaches or exceeds the yield stress of the material. The experimental data on structural failure showed that the failure stress predicted based on vMS was very close to the failure stress observed in ductile metallic materials, and hence the universal use of von Mises Failure criterion for ductile materials.