Design criteria and safety factors for plastic components design

The selection of a design criterion is a very important activity in the component design. When dealing with plastic components, this activity must be more sensible, since these materials have a mechanical behaviour very different, for example, from the metallic materials, which are widely used in the engineering. Plastic materials are very sensitive to the hydrostatic stress components, thus, the Von Mises criterion cannot be used in the plastic component design, as it is widely used in metallic ones. In this case, other criteria must be selected. Thus, the purpose of this work is to explicit and discuss the main design criteria, which can be used in plastic component design and explicit recommendations of safety factors appropriated to the plastic component domain.