Introduction

摘要

Although studies of indentation hardness of solids have been carried out for more than a century, it is only during the last 30-40 years that researchers started to develop and use instrumented indentation machines with which both the indenter load and indenter displacement are recorded simultaneously and accurately. Since the availability of commercial instrumented indentation machines in the 1980s, their use has been extended to almost all branches of materials sciences and even some aspects of biological sciences. Mechanical properties of materials can now be measured from the macro-scale down to the nano-scale. These mechanical properties include hardness, Young's modulus, equivalent uni-axial yield stress, fracture toughness, elasticity of biological cells, viscoelasticity and residual stresses. The instrumented indentation machine has indeed become an essential aid to universal material characterization and modeling.