Characterization of Surface/subsurface Damage for Ceramics with Nanoindentation method

Ceramics are increasingly used in the fields of aerospace, communication, mechanical and modern biomedical engineering. With high hardness, strength and abrasive resistance, the machined ceramic components are most likely to contain surface/subsurface damages, influencing strongly the performance and reliability of ceramic components. Nanoindentation test is an advanced technology in measuring the elastic modulus and hardness of the materials in micro-nano scale based on Oliver-Phar's equation. Nanoindentation has been employed extensively to characterize the mechanical properties of a wide range of materials including ceramics. To characterize the surface/subsurface damage in ceramics, a degraded elastic modulus based damage variable is defined to describe the damage induced property degradation of the materials based on the traditional Kachanov continuum damage mechanics (CDM) framework. A simple characterization method for surface/subsurface damage is realized based on nanoindentation test. The alumina bulk samples are chosen to study the surface/subsurface indentation induced damage by nanoindentaiton. The elastic modulus under various indenting loads is measured with Conical and Berkovich tip. The variation of the elastic modulus and indentation induced damage with load and displacement are analyzed in detail. Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible and satisfactory.