What is the difference between bearing stress and shear stress

Strain Analysis. Basic Math. Basic Equations. Material Properties. Structural Shapes. Beam Equations. Shear Loading on Plate. In addition to normal stress that was covered in the previous section, shear stress is an important form of stress that needs to be understood and calculated.

Shear Loading on Bolt. Shear Loading from Hole Punch. Shear Loading on Lap Joint. In actual shear stress distribution, it is not uniform and the maximum shear stress will be higher than the average shear stress.

If the opposite shear stresses are strong enough, they can result in the object getting deformed or skewed out of shape. Under ideal conditions, deformation due to shear stress merely changes the geometry of an object without changing its volume. To represent this resistance to deformation due to shear stress, each object has a unique shear modulus value. To quantify the shear stress that a body experiences, you only need to get the ratio of the shear force acting on the body and the whole surface area parallel to the shear force.

In most cases, this parallel surface area can be quite big, resulting in low shear stress values. In a pipe that contains a moving fluid, the point of contact between the pipe and the fluid undergoes a near-constant state of shear stress.

The value of this shear stress is determined by the viscosity of the fluid and the rate at which the fluid is flowing. The bearing stress is a type of stress related to compressive normal stress that a body experiences whenever it is in contact with another body in equilibrium conditions.

However, bearing stress is a special term that applies to elements in an object that bear a load — those that support or hold another part. A common example is a bolt that holds two, overlapping flat bars together, or a bolt that is used to secure a flat bar to a clevis.

From our discussion on stress and force, you may recall that the value of the stress is equivalent to the ratio of the force to the cross-sectional area to which the force acts. This is they key to understanding the difference between bearing stress and the stress due to a normal force. Whereas external forces acting on the object are distributed over a large area, the equivalent of these forces on a bearing, such as a bolt, are more concentrated.

This results to a huge bearing stress, often several times higher than the stress being experienced by the other parts of a body. For this reason, bearings and the notches through which they come in contact with a body are often the points of failure of a complex, interconnected object. These high-stress areas, called stress raisers, need to be designed to be extremely durable.

If you are building an object made of several different parts, then you need to take into account the increased stress that notches and bearings will experience if any external forces act on the object.

How snugly a bearing fits into a notch also plays a role in determining the bearing stress, as a tight fit typically results in a larger contact area between the bearing and the notch. Failure due to excessive bearing stress can result in either or both of two things: deformation of the bolt holding the parts together, or deformation of the notch. In any case, it is important to remember that bearing stress is a result of compressive forces, the direction of which dictate the mechanism of failure.

Tearing stress, also called tear-out stress, is a type of shear stress that is related to a specific type of failure of an object. A tear-out happens when an object cracks along a plane parallel to the direction of shear forces. Tearing stress is related to both shear stress and bearing stress, as it is a failure mechanism that typically occurs in notches due to shear forces.

A tear-out commonly happens when a notch is placed to close to the edge of a material. Basically, what happens is a portion of the plate, right after the notch, gets torn out due to excessive shear forces.

A similar tear-out can also happen on the bolt, although this a much rarer event. There are two major method to do analysis or even design in RC -ultimate limit state and elastic limit state method also called working stress method. Nowadays, ultimate limit state method has taken over elastic's approach which is used in the past some old book uses this.

Related questions. Knowing that the shearing stress must not exceed MPa in the steel rod and 70 M. Send feedback.