Review of indentation size effect in crystalline materials: Progress, challenges and opportunities

• DOI: 10.1016/j.jmrt.2024.06.071
• Publication Date: 2024-06-12T01:13:11Z
• Authors: Ziyi Shen; Yutai Su; Zhiyuan Liang; Xu Long
• Keywords: Indentation

Nanoindentation has been widely utilized for measuring mechanical properties at small scales over the past three decades. Indentation size effect (ISE) is a crucial phenomenon in nanoindentation testing of crystalline materials, which usually manifested as an increase hardness with decrease indent size. Tremendous efforts have made to understand ISE aim eliminating its influence on determining intrinsic properties. More importantly, key exploring unique deformation mechanisms materials nanoscale. We critically review experimental observations focusing influences indenter geometry and crystal structure. In addition, mechanistic models proposed well recent findings by numerical simulations are also examined detail explore origins identify unsolved challenges.