work hardening

noun

1. the toughening or strengthening of a metal by cold-working or another mechanical process.

Example Sentences

“We’ve done extensive work hardening our systems to prevent unauthorized access, and it was interesting to see how that hardening slowed us down as we tried to recover from an outage caused not by malicious activity but an error of our own making,” Mr. Janardhan wrote.

From New York Times

Remarkably, the resulting material exhibits properties similar to those of conventional crystalline metals: it undergoes work hardening and does not form shear bands.

From Nature

When the authors then deform them under the less-constrained conditions of a tensile or compressive test, structural relaxation sets in: the atomic packing increases and the volume introduced by the earlier deformation disappears; the number of STZs drops, causing the flow stress to increase; and work hardening is achieved.

From Nature

This makes work hardening one of the most complex problems in science: it needs to be understood at many length scales, from the atomic-scale lengths of the dislocation cores, through the nano- and micrometre scales involved in dislocation interactions and structures, to the macroscale lengths associated with crack propagation and the structural stability of bulk materials.

From Nature

As early as 1964, when Republicans put forward Barry Goldwater as their presidential nominee, right-wing activists were at work hardening the conservative line.

From Washington Post