Like if I threw an egg at a wall the egg would break, but if the egg is going really fast the wall would break too? Whats the underlying mechanic for this?
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ELI5 version: imagine two tall pointy right triangles of slightly different sizes with slightly different slopes. These represent how much energy a material will absorb if it stretches some amount. The angle of the triangle’s slope is how hard the material is (sharper upright slope/taller right triangle is harder). When two materials come into contact, they both stretch/compress based on the hardness, they will compress/stretch different amounts of distance. For every unit of stretch, imagine shaving off a little bit of the horizontal distance of the triangle. When one triangle disappears, the material breaks.
Less ELI5: I’m gonna go with energy absorbed by each material until the “elastic yield strength” limit is reached. If you look at a stress-strain curve for any material, usually there’s a flat slope at first and then some sorta curve. Usually, as something stretches when in contact with a force, you move sideways on this graph/curve. Once you reach the end of the flat slope portion, your material suffers unrecoverable damage. If the stress strain curve ends abruptly, you have a brittle fracture and a rapidly propagating crack. If you have a long tail with a small slope, you have a really playdough-y failure. The integral/area under the curve, of any stress strain plot, is the total energy absorbed by a material for a given strain amount. Strain is basically % stretch/compress.
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Definitely not an ELI5, this involves way more than a simple explanation. Momentum, fluid dynamics, geometry, materials, etc.
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