Relaxation indentation experiments using atomic force microscopy (AFM) are used to obtain viscoelastic material properties of soft samples. The quasilinear viscoelastic (QLV) model formulated by Fung (1972, "Stress Strain History Relations of Soft Tissues in Simple Elongation," in Biomechanics, Its Foundation and Objectives, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, pp. 181-207) for uniaxial compres...

Non-linear quasi-static axisymmetric indentation problem is studied for comparitive computational analysis between elasto-plastic parameters and mechanical behaviour of homogeneous engineering metal materials. Mathematical model, based on deformation theory version of J2 theory, leads to quasi-static elasto-plastic contact problem with unknown contact domain, depending on the value of a indenta...

In the present article, a new method for the determination of the hardening law using the load displacement curve, F–h, of a spherical indentation test is developed. This method is based on the study of the error between an experimental indentation curve and a number of finite elements simulation curves. For the smaller values of these errors, the error distribution shape is a valley, which is ...

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One of the primary features of nano-indentation technique is that the contact area induced by an indenter is indirectly measured by a relationship between the penetration depth and the known geometry of the indenter. However, this indirect measurement occasionally leads to inaccurate properties of the indented material. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of E/σr and the s...

This study is aimed to develop a novel noncontact ultrasonic indentation system for measuring quantitative mechanical properties of soft tissues, which are increasingly important for tissue assessment and characterization. The key idea of this method is to use a water jet as an indenter to compress the soft tissue while at the same time as a medium for an ultrasound beam to propagate through. T...

Detecting and localizing hard lumps in soft tissues is an important medical procedure. A psychophysics experiment measured minimum indentation forces required to detect a hard ball embedded in a soft rubber model. Ball size and finger indentation speed were varied. Threshold detection forces increased with ball size and decreased with indentation speed. The shape of the finger and contact press...

Nix and Gao established an important relation between microindentation hardness and indentation depth. Such a relation has been verified by many microindentation experiments (indentation depths in the micrometer range), but it does not always hold in nanoindentation experiments (indentation depths approaching the nanometer range). We have developed a unified computational model for both microan...

The indentation slope curve from a spherical indentation on elastic-plastic materials is examined. By comparing it with that of an linear elastic material of the same elastic properties, we found that the start point of plastic yielding for an elastic-plastic material can be easily located from the indentation slope curve. Based on this analysis, a simple but effective method is proposed tomeas...

Indentation methods are finding increasing use in the study of mechanical properties of bulk and thin-film materials over a wide range of size scales (e.g., [1,2]). With the increasing sophistication of instrumented, depth-sensing indentation equipment and of computational methods to model the deformation of materials subjected to indentation, there is growing interest in studying the elastopla...