Grid indentation analysis of composite microstructure and mechanics: Principles and validation

By Georgios Constantinides, K. Chandran, Franz-Josef Ulm, K. Vliet. 2006

609 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several composites comprise material phases that cannot be recapitulated ex situ, including calcium silicate hydrates in cementitous materials, hydroxyapatite in bone, and clay agglomerates in geomaterials. This requirement for in situ synthesis and characterization of chemically complex phases obviates conventional mechanical testing of large specimens representative of these material components. Current advances in experimental micro and nanomechanics have afforded new opportunities to explore and understand the effect of thermochemical environments on the microstructural and mechanical characteristics of naturally occurring material composites. Here, we propose a straightforward application of instrumented indentation to extract the in situ elastic properties of individual components and to image the connectivity among these phases in composites. This approach relies on a large array of nano to microscale contact experiments and the statistical analysis of the resulting data. Provided that the maximum indentation depth is chosen carefully, this method has the potential of extracting elastic properties of the indented phase which are minimally affected by the surrounding medium. An estimate of the limiting indentation depth is provided by asssuming a layered, thin film geometry. The proposed methodology is tested on a “model” composite material, a titanium-titanium monoboride (Ti–TiB) of various volumetric proportions. The elastic properties, volume fractions, and morphological arrangement of the two phases are recovered. These results demonstrate the information required for any micromechanical model that would predict composition-based mechanical performance of a given composite material.

Subfields: Ceramics and Composites, Materials Chemistry, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2b002872337d8967d2617173edb7d6e891006226

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In Ceramics and Composites

In Materials Chemistry

In Mechanics of Materials

Citations in the corpus

The effect of the nanogranular nature of shale on their poroelastic behavior (2007, methodology): “co-workers in recent years for heterogeneous materials [ 22 ].”
Nanoindentation characteristics of alkali-activated aluminosilicate materials (2011, methodology): “True intrinsic values obtained by nanoindentation can be achieved if the stiffness contrast between matrix and inclusion is less than five [17,24].”
Fast identification of poroelastic parameters from indentation tests (2009, background): “Nevertheless inverse FE modeling is computationally too expensive to be employed when large amounts of data need be analyzed, as it is typically the case of grid indentation mapping (Constantinides et al., 2008) where up to thousands of indentation tests are carried out.”
Surface Roughness Criteria for Cement Paste Nanoindentation (2008, background): “To address this challenge, it is advantageous to perform large grids of indentations on heterogeneous samples, such as cement paste [2,6,4,3].”
Application of nanoindentation technology in rocks: a review (2020, background): “Grid nanoindentation was initially invented by Constantinides et al. (2003, 2006) to study the mechanical properties of heterogeneous materials through developing a map of the chemo-mechanical constituents of materials (Zhu et al. 2009; Abedi et al. 2016a; Akono and Kabir 2016; Hou et al. 2016).”
Investigating electrode calendering and its impact on electrochemical performance by means of a new discrete element method model: Towards a digital twin of Li-Ion battery manufacturing (2020, positive): “[55] Due to its direct correlation with the mechanical properties of the sample, the experimental load-displacement curve of the electrode was used to parametrize the calendering model, by fitting this curve with a simulated one over the modeled electrode.”
A novel approach for micro‐scale characterization and modeling of geomaterials incorporating actual material heterogeneity (2012, methodology): “[7] To overcome the above limitations, grid indentation technique was proposed [Constantinides et al., 2006] and successfully applied to a wide range of materials [Randall et al., 2009].”
Nanogranular packing of C–S–H at substochiometric conditions (2010, methodology): “To address this challenge, it is advantageous to perform large grids of indentations on heterogeneous samples, such as cement paste [21,23,24], and other compositematerials [33,34].”
The nano-mechanical signature of Ultra High Performance Concrete by statistical nanoindentation techniques (2008, methodology): “SEM images of the cannot be assessed directly by nanoindentation, but needs to be analyzed from scaling relations [17,36].”
A review on the mechanical properties of cement-based materials measured by nanoindentation (2015, methodology): “Grid nanoindentation technique can be used to map the mechanical properties [5,21,22,26,27,74,110] and produce the dataset for statistical analysis [9,92].”