How does the strength of a metal vary in tension, compression and shear

You’re asking questions that you’d practically need college courses in Strengths of Materials to get the failure theories part and then a course in Materials Science to get the metals properties/behaviors parts.

Anyways- failure theories like Von-Mises account for ductile metals tendency to fail in shear (accounting for the state of stress/ stress tensor: hydrostatic vs purely dilatational or somewhere in between. ) Dude- there’s tons of stuff you’re asking about.

Crack propagation is generally considered a fatigue phenomenon as opposed to outright tensile / compressive / shear fracture due to overload. Though the former often can lead to the latter. Depends on the loading.

Some metals have higher compressive strength than tensile strength (grey cast iron IIRC) due to their structure.

/r/AskEngineers Thread