noun
definition
The quality or state of being plastic.
definition
The property of a solid body whereby it undergoes a permanent change in shape or size when subjected to a stress exceeding a particular value (the yield value)
Examples of plasticity in a Sentence
Nothing better shows the plasticity of her character than the ease with which she adapted herself to this sudden change.
This plasticity is, however, itself hereditary.
Tresca show that the plasticity of certain metals at least goes considerably farther than had before been supposed.
Pure lead isa feebly lustrous bluishwhite metal, endowed with a characteristically high degree of softness and plasticity, and almost entirely devoid of elasticity.
Closely related to the structure of metals is their degree of "plasticity" (susceptibility of being constrained into new forms without breach of continuity).
But their most characteristic, though not perhaps their most general, property is that they combine in themselves the apparently incompatible properties of elasticity and rigidity on the one hand and plasticity on the other.
What we have called plasticity must not be confused with the notion of "softness," which means the degree of facility with which the plasticity of a metal can be discounted.
Most metals when molten are capable of dissolving at least small proportions of carbon, which, in general, leads to a deterioration in metallicity, except in the case of iron, which by the addition of small percentages of carbon gains in elasticity and tensile strength with little loss of plasticity (see Iron).
The quality of plasticity is developed to very different degrees in different metals, and even in the same species it depends on temperature, and may be modified by mechanical or physical operations.
But all these operations render the metals harder, and detract from their plasticity.
Copper, when pure to start with, suffers considerable deterioration in plasticity.
The style of the whole book is nervous, vivid, free from artifice and rhetoric, obeying the writer's thought with absolute plasticity.
In many examples of apparent plasticity it can be shown that this effect has been produced by an infinite number of minute slippings within the rock substance.
Once the brain no longer has excess synapses to play with, it loses much of its plasticity.
The term " synaptic plasticity " refers to the ability to maintain or improve synapse function.
Nevertheless, the findings suggest remarkable plasticity and robustness of language in spite of brain lesions that would devastate an adult's language abilities.
For De Maillet not only has a definite conception of the plasticity of living things, and of the production of existing species by the modification of their predecessors, but he clearly apprehends the cardinal maxim of modern geological science, that the explanation of the structure of the globe is to be sought in the deductive application to geological phenomena of the principles established inductively by the study of the present course of nature.
Processes of annealing, or very gradual cooling, are intended to relieve these strains, but such processes are only completely effective when the cooling, particularly through those ranges of temperature where the glass is just losing the last traces of plasticity, is extremely gradual, a rate measured in hours per degree Centigrade being required.
Most metals when molten are capable of dissolving at least small proportions of carbon, which, in general, leads to a deterioration in metallicity, except in the case of iron, which by the addition of small percentages of carbon gains in elasticity and tensile strength with little loss of plasticity.
To what extent such responses are transmitted to offspring, and what part they play in the formation of the adaptive characters that are conspicuous in many animals, remain dubious, but it is at least clear that natural selection can favour those individuals and those races which show the greatest power of responsive plasticity in the individual.
From the time of Pyrrho overlapping Aristotle himself, who seems to have been well content to use the feints of more than one school among his predecessors, while showing that none of them could claim to get past his guard, down through a period in which the decadent academy under Carneades, otherwise dogmatic in its negations, supplied new thrusts and parries, to Aenesidemus in the late Ciceronian age, and again to Sextus Empiricus, there seems to have been something of plasticity and continuous progress.
Despite the large number of the optic nerve fibers their capacity of plasticity for to achieve recovery is rather limited.