The effect of the cobalt content and WC grain size on the deformation behaviour of WC-Co hard metals was investigated by studying materials with a varying WC grain size and cobalt content. The WC grain size ranged from 2.65 to 0.25 µm and the binder content ranged from 6 to 15 wt%. Single and multiple scratch tests were conducted using a Nano indenter with a Berkovich diamond tip and the load ranged from 5 to 500 mN with a tip sliding velocity of 10 µm/s. Several damage mechanisms were observed and these show a combination of ductile and brittle wear. The bulk properties i.e. composite properties of the hard metal determine the wear in the 6 wt% Co samples on the other hand the 15 wt% Co samples exhibited a localised response to the wear i.e. the wear is determined by the individual phases in the hard metal.

When grown via chemical vapor deposition carbon nanotubes (CNTs) may take on the form of a “turf”, consisting of many CNTs with a complex interconnectedness attached to an inflexible substrate. These turfs can be formed over large areas and with a range of heights (between 1 to 100 μm), and grown on photolithographically patterned catalysts to form different aspect ratios. This study focuses on the indentation and permanent deformation of CNT assemblages under applied contact loading. Nanoindentation was conducted on CNT turfs and the properties, nominally the turf's elastic modulus and hardness, were 14.9 MPa ± 5.7 MPa and 2 MPa respectively. The onset of permanent deformation during indentation occurred at applied stresses of 2.5 MPa. The turf's collective permanent deformation under applied compressive loading was also studied. A model predicting the buckling stress of CNT turfs is also described.

There is a technological need for hard thin films with high elastic modulus and fracture toughness. Silicon carbide (SiC) fulfills such requirements for a variety of applications at high temperatures and for high-wear MEMS. A detailed study of the mechanical properties of single crystal and polycrystalline 3C-SiC films grown on Si substrates was performed by means of nanoindentation using a Berkovich diamond tip. The thickness of both the single and polycrystalline SiC films was around 1-2 μm. Under indentation loads below 500 μN both films exhibit Hertzian elastic contact without plastic deformation. The polycrystalline SiC films have an elastic modulus of 457 GPa and hardness of 33.5 GPa, while the single crystalline SiC films elastic modulus and hardness were measured to be 433 GPa and 31.2 GPa, respectively. These results indicate that polycrystalline SiC thin films are more attractive for MEMS applications when compared with the single crystal 3C-SiC, which is promising since growing single crystal 3C-SiC films is more challenging.

In this work we have investigated the strength variability of brittle thin films (thickness ≤ 1 μm) utilising a simple test methodology. Nanoindentation of as-deposited tetrahedral amorphous carbon (ta-C) and Ti-Si-N nanocomposite films on silicon substrates followed by cross-sectional examination of the damage with a Focused Ion Beam (FIB) Miller allows the occurrence of cracking to be assessed in comparison with discontinuities (pop-ins) in the load-displacement curves. Strength is determined from the critical loads at which cracking occurs using the theory of plates on a soft foundation. This is of great relevance, since the fracture strength of thin films ultimately controls their reliable use in a broad range of functional applications.

In general, the method of obtaining residual stress from indentation test requires calculating the contact area of indenter and indented material, and also needs to know yield stress of indented material in advance. In this work, the dimensional analysis of indentation loading curve was first analyzed, and then a reverse numerical procedure was explored to show a possibility of determining residual stress and yield stress of materials simultaneously from indentation test. Besides, the calculation of contact area can be also avoided.

Wear behavior of freshly cleaved single crystal calcite (CaCO3) was investigated by continuous scanning using the Hysitron Triboindenter in ambient environment as a function of scanning frequency (1 Hz – 3 Hz) and contact load (2 µN – 8 µN). At lower loads below 4 µN, initiation of the ripples takes place at the bottom of the surface slope, which continue to propagate up the slope as scanning progresses. The orientation of these ripple structures is perpendicular to the long scan direction. As the number of scans increases, ripples become fully developed, and their height and periodicity increase with the number of scans. At 6 µN normal load, tip-induced wear occurs as the tip begins removing the ripple structures with increased number of scan cycles. As the contact load increased further, ripples did not initiate and only tip-induced wear occurred on the surface, and saturated after 20 scans. At 1 Hz frequency wear takes place as material slides towards the scan edges when the tip moves back and forth. Material removal rate increased with contact load and it is observed that the number of scans required to create a new surface is inversely proportional to the contact load. Possible mechanisms responsible for the formation of ripples at higher frequencies are attributed to the slope of the surface, piezo hysteresis, system dynamics, or a combination of effects. The wear regime is due to abrasive wear. Single crystal calcite hardness of 2.8±0.3 GPa and elastic modulus of 75±4.9 GPa were measured using nanoindentation and used to determine the wear mode.

Thermoplastic olefins (TPO) have made significant inroads as polymeric materials for interior and exterior automotive parts. Spray applied chlorinated polyolefins (CPO) are often used to improve paint adhesion to the low surface energy TPO substrates. The penetration of the CPO into the substrate is difficult to quantify, but is critical to achieving a good paint/TPO bond. The interphase between each layer in a coated TPO coupon was investigated using a combination of instrumented indentation and confocal Raman microscopy. The degree of CPO interpenetration was Thermoplastic olefins (TPO) have made significant inroads as polymeric materials for interior and exterior automotive parts. Spray applied chlorinated polyolefins (CPO) are often used to improve paint adhesion to the low surface energy TPO substrates. The penetration of the CPO into the substrate is difficult to quantify, but is critical to achieving a good paint/TPO bond. The interphase between each layer in a coated TPO coupon was investigated using a combination of instrumented indentation and confocal Raman microscopy. The degree of CPO interpenetration was altered by using three different CPOs exposed to two different manufacturing methods for the same TPO and base/clear coat system. It was found that the interfaces, CPO/base coat or CPO/TPO, were chemically and mechanically sharp at the 1 μm lateral resolution of both techniques. A gradient in the modulus through the thickness of the clear coat was observed using instrumented indentation.

This paper summarises our recent cyclic nanoindentation experiment studies on a range of materials including single crystal and nanocrystalline copper, single crystal aluminium and bulk metallic glasses with different glass transition temperatures. The unloading and reloading processes of the nanoindentation curves have been analysed. The reverse plasticity will be discussed in the context of plastic deformation mechanisms involved. The effect of loading rates on the mechanical properties of materials upon cyclic loading will also be discussed.

A new theoretical model is constructed for the viscoelastic response of a clamped circular membrane deformed by a spherical indenter, using the classical Maxwell and Standard Linear Solid (SLS) constitutive equations. Preliminary stress-relaxation experiments are performed for a hydrogel membrane and the corresponding data fitted to the SLS-based viscoelastic model.

While elastic and plastic material property extraction from instrumented indentation tests has been well-studied, similarly-based fracture property measurement remains difficult. Furthermore, estimation of the fracture toughness requires measurement of the crack lengths from a micrograph, which makes nano-scale indentation toughness measurement expensive and difficult. Initiation and propagation of cracks on the nano-scale requires a more acute indenter than a Berkovich or sphere, such as the cube-corner pyramid. Experiments described here were performed on a range of elastic, plastic and brittle materials with diamond indenters of acuity varying between the Berkovich and the cube-corner. These experiments reveal some of what is changed and what remains the same, when the acuity of the probe is changed, when fracture is initiated at the contact, or both. A preliminary model for the physical origin of the extra crack-driving power of acute probes is presented in light of these, and complementary macro-scale in-situ indentation experiments. This work provides the basis for development of instrumented indentation-based nano-scale toughness measurement.

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.

Based on recent studies, mechanical and tribological properties such as hardness, Young's modulus, friction, and scratch adhesion strength on various coatings and ultra-thin films are reported. These results were obtained using a Universal Nano+Micro Tester UNMT-1, suitably designed for comprehensive evaluation of mechanical and tribological properties of bulk materials, coatings and thin films. Results indicate that a substrate effect for ultra-thin films is substantial when using conventional static nanoindentation technique, while negligible with an advanced dynamic nano-indentation. Comparative results of hardness and Young's modulus obtained from various techniques are presented. Also, a means to evaluate friction and adhesion strength of thin films is highlighted, using DLC specimens as an example.

Instrumented indentation is often used in the study of small-scale mechanical behavior of “soft” matters that exhibit viscoelastic behavior. A number of techniques have been used to obtain the viscoelastic properties from quasi-static or oscillatory indentations. This paper summarizes our recent findings from modeling indentation in linear viscoelastic solids. These results may help improve methods of measuring viscoelastic properties using instrumented indentation techniques.

The high pressures generated at a contact during nanoindentation have a quantifiable effect on the measured indentation modulus. This effect can be accounted for by invoking a Murnaghan equation of state-based analysis where the measured indentation modulus is a function of the hydrostatic component of the stress state which is generated beneath the indenter tip. This approach has implications pertinent to a range of mechanical characterization techniques that include instrumented indentation and quantitative atomic force microscopy (AFM) since these techniques traditionally consider only zero-pressure modulus values during data interpretation. To demonstrate the validity of this approach, the indentation modulus of four materials (fused quartz, sapphire, rutile and silicon) is evaluated using a 1 μm radius conospherical diamond tip to maximum contact depths of 30 nm. The tip area function is independently determined via AFM while the unloading stiffness from the load-displacement data is determined using standard Oliver-Pharr analysis.

Much recent attention has been focused on the indentation of linearly viscoelastic solids, and analysis techniques have been developed for polymeric material characterization. However, there has been relatively little progress made in the development of analytical approaches for indentation of nonlinearly viscoelastic materials. Soft biological tissues tend to exhibit responses which are nonlinearly viscoelastic and are frequently modeled using a decomposition of the relaxation or creep function into a product of two functions, one time-dependent and the other stress- or strain-level dependent. Consideration here is for soft biological tissue-like responses, exhibiting approximately quadratic stress-strain behavior, which can be alternatively cast as linear dependence of elastic modulus on strain level. An analytical approach is considered in the context of indentation problems with flat punch, spherical and conical indenter shapes. Hereditary integral expressions are developed and solved for typical indentation experimental conditions including indentation creep, load-relaxation and monotonic constant load- or displacement-rate tests. Primary emphasis is on the deconvolution of material and geometrical nonlinearities during an indentation experiment. The simple analytical expressions that result from this analysis can be implemented for indentation characterization of soft biological tissues without the need for computationally- intensive inverse finite element approaches.

The nanohardness and microhardness testing of crystalline materials with different types of interatomic bonds and different crystal structures was performed with Berkovich indenter.

The plasticity characteristics for crystalline materials with different types of interatomic bonds and different crystalline structures were determined by microindentation and by nanoindentation. The relation between these characteristics and parameters of material (Meyer hardness, Young's modulus and Poisson's ratio) was assigned. Plasticity characteristic may be used for characterization of mechanical behavior of materials which are brittle at standard mechanical tests and for coatings.

It is shown using a method based on the mean field theory of Miklavic Marcelja that it should be possible for osmotic pressure due to the counterions associated with the two polyelectrolyte polymer brush coated surfaces to support a reasonable load (i.e., about 105 Pa) with the brushes held sufficiently far apart to prevent entanglement of polymers belonging to the two brushes, thus avoiding what is likely to be the dominant mechanisms for static and dry friction.

The deformation zone below nanoindents in copper single crystals with an <110>{111} orientation is investigated. Using a focused ion beam (FIB) system, cross-sections through the center of the indents were fabricated and subsequently analyzed by means of electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD) technique. Additionally, cross-sectional TEM foils were prepared and examined. Due to changes in the crystal orientation around and beneath the indentations, the plastically deformed zone can be visualized and related to the measured hardness values. Furthermore, the hardness data were analyzed using the Nix-Gao model where a linear relationship was found for H2 vs. 1/hc, but with different slopes for large and shallow indentations. The measured orientation maps indicate that this behavior is presumably caused by a change in the deformation mechanism. On the basis of possible dislocation arrangements, two models are suggested and compared to the experimental findings. The model presented for large imprints is based on dislocation pile-ups similar to the Hall-Petch effect, while the model for shallow indentations uses far-reaching dislocation loops to accommodate the shape change of the imprint.

Parallel molecular dynamics simulations were used to study the influence of pre-existing growth twin boundaries on the slip activity of bulk gold under uniaxial compression. The simulations were performed on a 3D, fully periodic simulation box at 300 K with a constant strain rate of 4×107 s−1. Different twin boundary interspacings from 2 nm to 16 nm were investigated. The strength of bulk nano-twinned gold was found to increase as the twin interspacing was decreased. However, strengthening effects related to the twin size were less significant in bulk gold than in gold nanopillars. The atomic analysis of deformation modes at the twin boundary/slip intersection suggested that the mechanisms of interfacial plasticity in nano-twinned gold were different between bulk and nanopillar geometries.

Silicon oxynitride (SiON) films with different oxygen and nitrogen content were deposited by RF magnetron sputtering. Fourier-transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy study revealed that co-sputterred SiON films were composed of one homogeneous phase of random bonding O-Si-N network. Time-dependent plastic deformation (creep) of SiON films were investigated by depth-sensing nanoindentation at room temperature. Results from nanoindentation creep indicated that plastic flow was relatively less homogenous with increasing nitrogen content in film composition. A deformation mechanism based on atomic bonding structure and shear transformation zone (STZ) plasticity theory was proposed to interpret creep behaviors of sputtered SiON films.