GRID NANOINDENTATION ON MULTIPHASE MATERIALS FOR MAPPING THE MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF COMPLEX MICROSTRUCTURES

Jiri Nohava, Petr Hausild, Nicholas X. Randall , Gregory Favaro

Abstract

Instrumented indentation has now become established for the single point characterization of hardness and elastic modulus of both bulk and coated materials. This makes it a good technique for measuring mechanical properties of homogeneous materials. However, many composite materials are composed of several phases whose properties are difficult or even impossible to examine in bulk form ex situ (e.g., carbides in a ferrous matrix, martensite and austenite in steels, etc.). The requirement for in situ analysis and characterization of such structured materials with different phases obviates conventional mechanical testing of large specimens' representative of these material components. This paper will focus on new developments in the way that nanoindentation can be used as a two-dimensional mapping tool for examining the properties of constituent phases independently of each other. This approach relies on large arrays of nanoindentations (known as grid indentation) and statistical analysis of the resulting data. Two examples of application of the grid indentation method will be presented: indentation on naval brass and indentation on AISI 301 stainless steel.

Keywords

grid indentation, multiphase materials, statistics

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DOI

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IMEKO TC

TC5 - Hardness Measurement

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