Design and construction of a micro-indenter for tribological investigations

✍ Scribed by K. S. Tan; A. W. Hassel; M. Stratmann

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 172 KB
• Volume: 36
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0933-5137
• DOI: 10.1002/mawe.200400832

✦ Synopsis

Characterisation of erosion contact conditions remains a challenge due to the chaotic morphology of eroded surfaces. The present work presents details on the design and construction of a low load micro-indenter to investigate the initial stages of particle impact. Spherical ZrO 2 particles and angular SiC particles have been fitted onto stainless steel indenter tips to simulate contact between eroding particles on an aluminium surface. Contact loads between 50 and 1800 mN were utilised to elucidate the effects of load and indentation depth. Indented craters were subsequently imaged by the scanning electron microscope (SEM), revealing its particle dependent morphology. Crater area and depths from both types of particles were also quantified and subsequently correlated to the indentation load. It was demonstrated that contact pressure generated by angular particles are 1.5 times higher than those from spherical particles, resulting in greater plastic deformation and larger crater area at high loads. The work carried out during indentations were also calculated, it was shown that indentation experiments can be utilised for simulating dynamic erosion experiments under a large velocity range.