A critical assessment of the effect of indentation spacing on the measurement of hardness and modulus using instrumented indentation testing

By P. Phani, W. Oliver. Materials & Design (1980-2015), 2019

283 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract With the advances in instrumented indentation systems and testing methodologies, high speed indentation mapping with indents that take less than a second is now possible. This can be gainfully used to measure the local mechanical properties of multi-phase alloys and small volumes of materials with high throughput, which brings into question the minimum spacing between indents required to prevent interactions from neighboring indents. In this study, extensive indentation experiments (~50,000) and finite element simulations are carried out for a wide range of materials to systematically determine the minimum spacing of indents. It was found that a minimum indent spacing of 10 times the indentation depth is sufficient to obtain accurate results for a Berkovich indenter. This is less than half of the commonly followed criteria of spacing the indents three times the lateral dimension (or 20 times the depth). Similar results were also found for other indenter geometries. It was found that non-overlapping plastic zones are not a requirement for determining the minimum indent spacing and the new criteria is rationalized by simple energy arguments. These results significantly enhance the capabilities of indentation mapping technique which is recently being used as a critical characterization tool for accelerating materials development.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanics of Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a484decbc0044ddf86eafddbad086bdd13090517

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Biomedical Engineering

B. S. Murty

In Mechanics of Materials

Citations in the corpus

Application of nanoindentation technology in rocks: a review (2020, background): “The impacts of other factors, such as indentation space (Hintsala et al. 2018; Sudharshan Phani and Oliver 2019), tip wear (indenter loss) (Hintsala et al. 2018), sample tilt (Xu and Li 2007; Kashani and Madhavan 2011; Wang and Liu 2019) and contaminant-geomaterials interactions can also be investig”
Multiscale mechanical performance and corrosion behaviour of plasma sprayed AlCoCrFeNi high-entropy alloy coatings (2021, background): “[57], the inter-indent spacing can be safely reduced further; hence the resolution of XPM maps for such microstructures may be improved.”