The determination of elastic modulus (E) and hardness (H) relies on the accuracy of the contact area under the indenter tip, but this parameter cannot be explicitly measured during the nanoindentation process. This work presents a new approach that can derive the elastic modulus (E) and contact depth (hc) based on measured experiment stiffness using the continuous-stiffness-measurement (CSM) method. To achieve this, an inverse algorithm is proposed by incorporating a set of stiffness-based relationship functions that are derived from combining the dimensional analysis approach and computational simulation. This proposed solution considers both the sink-in and pile-up contact profiles; therefore, it provides a more accurate solution when compared to a conventional method that only considers the sink-in contact profile. While the proposed solution is sensitive to Poisson's ratio (ν) and the equivalent indentation conical angle (θ), it is not affected by material plasticity, including yield strength (σy) and work hardening (n) for the investigated range of 0.001 < σy/E < 0.5. The proposed stiffness-based approach can be used to consistently derive elastic modulus and hardness by using stiffness and the load-and-unload curve measured by the continuous-stiffness-measurement (CSM) method.
Keywords: elastic modulus; hardness.; nanoindentation; stiffness.