Characterizing elastic constants of anisotropic materials by spherical indentation method

Abstract

By the theoretical analysis and the finite element (FE) method, a new model for measuring the elastic constants of transversely isotropic materials has been proposed from spherical indentation. A theoretical analysis of the spherical indentationmodulus for the materials is presented. Extensive spherical indentation tests were implemented by three dimensional (3D) FE simulations. By fitting the simulation results, the analytical relationship correlating the elastic parameters with the indentation moduli at three different indentation orientation angles (0°, 45°, and 90°) was set up. The effectiveness of the proposed method was examined by a series of numerical indentation experiments. It is found that the calculated values by the proposed method are well consistent with the input elastic parameters. The sensitivity of the calculated elastic parameters to the experimental data was analyzed. Simultaneously, this method was applied to carbon fiber materials. The results calculated by the method proposed in this paper were compared with results obtained by the theoretical model and experimental measurement to verify the effectiveness of this method. Thus the proposed method is practiced and could be used to identify the elastic properties of transversely isotropic materials.