Poisson’s ratio is a really important material property that helps describe how a material will deform under loading. It defines how much a material will deform in the lateral direction when a load is applied to it in the longitudinal direction.
This is expressed in terms of lateral and longitudinal strains in the equation below.
Poisson’s Ratio
The animated video below goes into more detail about Poisson’s ratio and explores some interesting topics like auxetic materials, which are materials that have a negative Poisson’s ratio, and incompressible materials, which are materials with a Poisson’s ratio of 0.5.
