A HYBRID METHOD FOR DETERMINING MATERIAL PROPERTIES FROM INSTRUMENTED MICRO-INDENTATION EXPERIMENTS

The impact code EPIC was employed to study the relationship between the applied force and the penetration depth in a micrometer-scale indentation experiment with oxygen free high conductivity (OFHC) copper. EPIC is an elastic-plastic finite element code that uses a Lagrangian formulation and triangular mesh, which can accommodate large deformation without the need to remesh during the computation process. By fitting the force-penetration curves for a triangular indenter with second degree polynomials, it was demonstrated that the fit changed with two material constants in the constitutive equation. A systematic procedure for determining the material constants is described that is based on matching either the slope or the curvature of the force penetration depth curves from numerical simulation and experiments. It is concluded that material constants can be determined from indentation data obtained using pyramidal or spherical indenters as well as a flat-ended indenter.