Mechanical characterisation of materials by microindentation and AFM scanning

As the realism and the interpretative capacity of constitutive models employed to describe the material response in different mechanical systems grow, the number of parameters to be experimentally determined becomes more and more numerous and less amenable to direct separate measurement. The combination of experiments, their simulation (by computer or, sometimes, by analytical solutions) and inverse analysis represents then the envisaged approach to material characterization, which has been applied to indentation tests mainly exploiting the traditional indentation curves as the source of experimental data. Recent literature shows that geometrical data concerning the imprint generated by indentation represents important supplementary information to be exploited for mechanical characterization purposes, with satisfactory results in terms of accuracy, robustness, and of the number of identifiable material characteristics. The present contribution intends to illustrate this novel methodology with the aid of some selected applications.