, is a measured parameter that quantifies the ability of a material to become stronger due to strain hardening.
Strain hardening (work hardening) is the process by which a material's load-bearing capacity increases during plastic (permanent) strain, or deformation.
[1] The uniaxial tension test is the primary experimental method used to directly measure a material's stress–strain behavior, providing valuable insights into its strain-hardening behavior.
[1] The strain hardening exponent is sometimes regarded as a constant and occurs in forging and forming calculations as well as the formula known as Hollomon's equation (after John Herbert Hollomon Jr.) who originally posited it as:
In one study, strain hardening exponent values extracted from tensile data from 58 steel pipes from natural gas pipelines were found to range from 0.08 to 0.25,[1] with the lower end of the range dominated by high-strength low alloy steels and the upper end of the range mostly normalized steels.