The risk of fracture does exist even in the carefully designed ceramics components under excess stress unexpected in design procedure such as high stresses caused by restraining the deformation at the contact region of the component. To assess the safety and the reliability of ceramics components under such circumstances, it is indispensable to take the damage tolerance of the material into consideration. Ceramics is thought to be perfectly brittle and have no damage tolerance. But, though very

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... little, it has the damage tolerance. The important problems open to us now are to estimate the extent of the damage tolerance of ceramics quantitatively and to clear the relation between the damage tolerance of the material and the reliability of the component. In this paper, we demonstrate the existence of the damage tolerance in the ceramics by tests using specimens of porous cordierite. The nonlinear stressstrain curve of the brittle material is thought to be a reflection of the damage tolerance of the material and it is shown that the nonlinear stress-strain curve obtained can be simulated by the distributed micro cracks model developed here. The relation between the damage tolerance and the reliability is also discussed through several simulation works. These simulations show that when the damage tolerance of the material is getting larger, the reliability of the component becomes higher. This conclusion is supported by the fracture test results using notched specimens of porous cordierite where the notch sensitivity is shown to be very little in this material. This means that this material has the high reliability under the stress concentration.