Cyclic hardness test PHYBALCHT – Short-time procedure to evaluate fatigue properties of metallic materials

The evaluation of fatigue properties of metallic materials with conventional methods requires time and cost consuming experiments. That is why a new short-time procedure named PHYBALCHT was developed at the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Kaiserslautern. This method requires only a planar material surface to perform cyclic force-controlled hardness indentation tests. To characterize fatigue properties of metallic materials the change of the force-indentation-depth-hysteresis has to be plotted versus the number of indentation cycles (N). In analogy to the plastic strain amplitude which is used to characterize the cyclic deformation behavior the indentation-depth width of the hysteresis loop is specified as plastic indentation-depth amplitude (ha,p). This parameter is well suited to characterize fatigue properties of metallic materials.