On modeling the micro-indentation response of an amorphous polymer

Interest in instrumented indentation experiments as a means to estimate mechanical properties has grown rapidly in recent years. Although numerous nano/micro-indentation experimental studies on polymeric materials have been reported in the literature, a corresponding methodology for extracting material property information from the experimental data does not exist. This situation for polymeric materials exists primarily because baseline numerical analyses of sharp indentation using appropriate large deformation constitutive models for the nonlinear viscoelastic–plastic response of these materials appear not to have been previously reported in the literature. An existing, widely used theory for amorphous polymers (e.g. [Boyce, M., Parks, D., Argon, A.S., 1988. Large inelastic deformation of glassy polymers. Part 1: Rate dependent constitutive model. Mechanics of Materials 7, 15–33; Arruda, E.M., Boyce, M.C., 1993. Evolution of plastic anisotropy in amorphous polymers during finite straining. International Journal of Plasticity 9, 697–720]) has been recently found to lack sufficient richness to enable one to quantitatively reproduce the major features of the indentation load-versus-depth curves for some common amorphous polymers [Gearing, B.P., 2002. Constitutive equations and failure criteria for amorphous polymeric solids. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology].