Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 February 2011
We proposed a method to determine the plastic properties of bulk materials based on data of loading curvature in indentation curve with only one sharp indenter. This method uses the dimensional analysis to solve the representative stress and effective yield stress. Indentation unloading data is only used to select the unique solution from the calculated ones obtained from representative stress and effective yield stress. We applied the proposed method to four engineering metals on an experimental basis, to verify its effectiveness, as well as its superiority to the reported methods.