FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF INDENTATION EXPERIMENTS IN SURFACE-COATED MATERIALS

There are only a few methods suitable for a quantitative characterizat ion of the mechanical properties of surface-coated materials; indentat ion testing is one of those methods. Within the last decade, a great d eal of effort has been made to improve the indentation test and to gat her information on the complete deformation process from experimental and numerical investigations. Following this line, this contribution c oncentrates on the numerical calculation of the elastic-plastic field of deformation in the specimen during the indentation process and the corresponding load-depth of indentation curves in dependence on the do minating parameters. The basic idea is to determine the influence of g eometrical imperfections of the indenter on the experimentally obtaine d-mechanical properties such as hardness and to provide methods which enable one to distinguish between properties of the system used for te sting and the material investigated. Results obtained for uncoated and coated materials are compared.