Author's reply to comments by Jurgen Malzbender on 'New ceramics-related investigation of the indentation energy concept' and 'A unified power-law correlation for Berkovich hardness testing of ceramics'

摘要

I would like to thank Dr. Malzbender [1] for taking time to read and write comments on my papers [2,3], in which I presented respectively, a new investigation of the indentation energy, and a global approach for the correlations between the indentation key quantities (load, displacement, energies, and residual contact area). It is a pleasure to notice that Dr. Malzbender appreciated this approach and I kindly welcome his collaborative spirit. The formulated comments are helpful and will not only serve to illuminate the subject in question further but give me the opportunity to make a few additional remarks and elements of complementary investigations. First of all, the received comments are encouraging in the sense that they are not a counter example for the necessity of defining a specific constant beta to describe the mechanical behaviour of each material submitted to the depth sensing experiment. However, I agree that errors in hardness testing and related Indentation Size Effect (ISE) have various sources and should be considered carefully.