All materials fail when over-stressed in a variety of ways.
An understanding of the nature of the failure and the role of the composition, microstructure, and thermomechanical history of a material is necessary to explain its response to a given environmental and loading condition. Such understanding is requisite for the development of materials with maximum resistance to failure under a given set of loading and environmental conditions. Equally important is a detailed understanding of how a given material responds under a variety of complex loading conditions and environments. These complex situations correspond to those encountered in real life during shaping and forming of materials and in a wide variety of service applications of materials. One of the factors that adds complexity to the behavior of materials is the rate of loading.