Nanoindentation for material property characterization

In the last decade, Nanoindentation has grown as a suitable tool for material characterization. It has been extensively used to measure the hardness and modulus of hard materials. Due to adhesive nature of soft materials and brittleness of particulate matter, such materials are much harder to characterize. 

In this work, techniques are developed for nanoindentation of soft polymers and brittle powdery materials. Young’s modulus and hardness are measured using the continuous stiffness measurements. Scratch tests are used to study fracture properties of the materials.