The Relation of the Vickers Hardness With the Loading Stiffness of Instrumented Vickers Indentation of Metal Substrates

Abstract

The present paper presents a relation between the vickers hardness HV and the loading stiffness C of instrumented vickers indentation of metal substrates. The relation is based on the fact that the nonaxisymmetry of the plastic deformation of the vickers indenter leaves the corners of the indentation imprint at the surface of metal substrates after complete unloading. This relation can transform available HV data for metals to C data. It is also shown that the strain hardening details are important in the estimation of material properties and investigators should be cautions when using power-law strain hardening in all cases. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4001300]