| This dissertation investigates methods for assessing the mechanical properties of materials using hardness values obtained from cone indentations. A broad range of isotropic metallic materials was simulated using finite element analysis. In particular, the elastic and plastic bulk properties, which define the stress-strain behavior of materials that exhibit power law hardening, are studied. Other investigators have found that the Young's modulus, E, can be determined from the unloading data of a cone indentation. Therefore, the remaining properties of interest, in this study, are the yield strength, Y, and the work hardening exponent, n.; Atkins and Tabor have conducted pioneering work in the area of determining the stress-strain behavior of a metallic material from cone indentation experiments. This work has been re-visited in this study using computational models implementing an expanded range of mechanical properties. Consequently, discrepancies in this prediction method were uncovered when the mechanical properties were outside of the original range studied. As a result, two new prediction methods have been developed using the data collected from the finite element simulations in conjunction with a regression technique. The first method correlates the non-dimensional hardness values, H/E, collected from five cone indentations to the non-dimensional mechanical properties, Y/E and n. The second method is similar in principle, but uses two hardness values as opposed to five. The yield strength can be estimated with a priori knowledge of E. Both of these methods are compared to the method developed by Atkins and Tabor.; Although the majority of the work mentioned is focused on the macro-scale, bulk mechanical properties, there is some investigation of meso-scale cone indentations. At the meso-scale, the number of geometric dislocations is significant enough to noticeably increase the strength of a material. This length scale effect is studied for various angled cone indentations through the implementation of Cosserat continuum mechanics into the finite element program. |
