Influence of friction in material characterization in microindentation measurement

A comprehensive computational study is undertaken to identify the influence of friction in material characterization by indentation measurement based on elasto- plastic solids. The impacts of friction on load versus indentation depth curve, and the values of calculated hardness and Young’s modulus in conical and spherical indentations are shown in this paper. The results clearly demonstrate that, for some elasto-plastic materials, the curves of load versus indentation depth obtained either by spherical or conical indenters with different friction coefficients, cannot be distinguished. However, if utilizing the parameter β (see text for details), to quantify the deformation of piling-up or sinking-in, it is easy to find that the influence of friction on piling-up or sinking-in in indentation is significant. Therefore, the material parameters which are related to the projected area will also have a large error caused by the influence of friction. The maximum differences on hardness and Young’s modulus can reach 14.59% and 6.78%, respectively, for some elastic materials shown in this paper. These results do not agree with those from researchers who stated that the instrumented indentation experiments are not significantly affected by friction.