Cockroach:
1) From any stress distribution you can of course derive the
principal stresses, this has nothing to do with the failure criterion
2) vonMises and Tresca (besides others) are simply two alternative failure criteria, they give hopefully quite close results for any stress pattern, the choice between them being normally dictated by the applicable code
3) All failure criteria, as the name implies, are based on an hypothesis on what type of derived stress component will cause failure when attaining a limit value
4) vonMises is also called the criterion of the maximum octahedral shear stress, so it also concerns shear phenomena! For this criterion the derived stress component is what is called the combined shear stress of vonMises, also called the quadratic invariant or the octahedral shear stress of Ros-Eichinger (names change, but the result is always the same)
5) For Tresca's criterion the derived stress component is the maximum shear stress
6) To visualize the relationship between the two criteria, one can observe that, in the space of the principal stresses, for vonMises the locus of the acceptable stress states is a circular cylinder (
Wikipedia), and for Tresca is an hexagonal cylinder, the hexagon being inscribed in the circle. So the two will give, as necessary, quite close results, and one could say that Tresca is safer than vonMises (though this is a completely different debate).
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