Tungsten carbide-cobalt (WC-Co) composites are a class of advanced materials that have unique properties, such as wear resistance, hardness, strength, fracture-toughness and both high temperature and chemical stability. It is well known that the local indentation properties (i.e., nano- and micro-hardness) of the single crystal WC particles dispersed in such composite materials are highly anisotropic. In this paper, the nanoindentation response of the WC grains of a compact, full-density, sintered WC-10Co composite material has been investigated as a function of the crystal orientation. Our nanoindentation survey has shown that the nanohardness was distributed according to a bimodal function. This function was post-processed using the unique features of the finite mixture modelling theory. The combination of electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) and statistical analysis has made it possible to identify the orientation of the WC crystal and the distinct association of the inherent nanoindentation properties, even for a small set (67) of nanoindentations. The proposed approach has proved to be faster than the already existing ones and just as reliable, and it has confirmed the previous findings concerning the relationship between crystal orientation and indentation properties, but with a significant reduction of the experimental data.
Keywords: anisotropy; atomic force microscopy; cermets; indentation properties; metal matrix composites; metallography; nanoinstrumented indentation test; tungsten carbide.