Tensile Strength of Whiskers

Tensile tests have been performed on whiskers of iron, copper, and silver 1.2 to 15 μ in diameter. The strongest whiskers which were less than 4 μ in diameter exhibited resolved elastic shear strengths of from two to six percent of their shear moduli. Stress-strain determinations on iron have shown that large deviations from Hooke's law occur beyond two percent strain. As the whiskers increase in size, their strengths decrease with considerable scatter.