An elasto-plastic contact model applied to nanoindentation

This paper is devoted to the finite element modeling of the nanoindentation problem. The frictional contact between the Berkovitch indenter and the very thin elasto-plastic film is treated by the bi-potential method. The elasto-plastic constitutive equation is integrated by means of the radial return mapping algorithm and the consistent tangent operator is explicitly derived. Numerical results show the validity of the model.