September 24, 2021
In partnership with Micro Materials. Established in 1988 Micro Materials has continually been at the forefront of innovation, with a pioneering approach leading to the world’s first nanoscale impact tester, commercial high-temperature nanoindentation stage and liquid cell.
Welcome to our second edition of Modern Surface. For those of us in academia, it’s the start a brand-new semester with all the hustle and bustle that the new term brings. It’s been great to see students return to campus properly after the past year and a half. For those of you in industry, it’s the beginning of the final quarter of the year, I wish you all a productive few months.
Nanoindentation is a key mechanical characterisation technique for thin films as well as targeting small areas and specific phases on samples. The microstructure and mechanical properties of selectively laser melted AlSi10Mg: The effect of a conventional T6-like heat treatment by Aboulkhair et al. is an excellent example of how the technique can fit into a complete characterisation of a material. Nanoindentation showed uniform hardness within the laser melted material and the heat treatment yielded an attractive compromise between strength and ductility opening up this material for a wider range of application and producing further opportunities for additive manufacturing.
Since its inception in the 1970s, nanoindentation has grown to become a mainstay in materials characterisation averaging over 1500 publications per year over the past 6 years. The graph below shows the growing number of publications and citations related to nanoindentation. You can explore the topic of nanoindentation further here.
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The Saxonian Institute of Surface Mechanics has produced numerous excellent modelling resources to supplement both surface engineering and tribological tests. E.g., their OptiWear package is an adaptive wear analysis software based on the extended Archad's law and contact solutions for layered materials, which can be adapted to many tribological scenarios.
**Have you seen the Micro Materials Ltd Linked In page?**It’s full of technical information and seminar invitations for all those with a professional interest in Nanomechanical testing techniques. Follow us at www.linkedin.com/company/micro-materials-ltd. Posted on the page this week is a summary of a chapter on Integrated nanomechanical characterisation of hard coatings contributed by our Director of Materials Research, Professor Ben Beake, working with Prof Tomasz Liskiewicz at MMU and Prof Vlad Vishnyakov from the University of Huddersfield to the new CRC Press book “Protective Thin Coatings Technology”. You can read Ben’s summary below:Our work in collaboration with Prof Tomasz Liskiewicz at MMU and Prof Vlad Vishnyakov at Huddersfield on combining advanced experimental techniques in the NanoTest with simulated stress distributions to better understand coating performance in demanding tribological applications and to design coating systems for improved wear resistance has just been published:- Chapter 4 “Integrated nanomechanical characterisation of hard coatings”, BD Beake, VM Vishnyakov, TW Liskiewicz, pp95-140 in the new CRC Press book “Protective Thin Coatings Technology”, Edited by S Zhang, J-M Ting and W-Y Wu, ISBN 9781003088349.In the chapter we show how detailed simulated stress distributions enable room and high temperature microtribological data to be interpreted more effectively providing mechanistic information which can be the key to unlocking exactly where and why coatings systems fail, and then to designing coatings with improved performance. Check out the post on LinkedIn here.
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