Determination of Glass Mechanical Characteristics by Instrumented Indentation

Abstract

In this work, we studied the mechanical characteristics of two different glasses (soda-lime glass and borosilicate) by using Vickers indentation. Considering the importance of the instrumented indentation and its increasingly widespread use, a systematic parametric study was thus undertaken. This study aims to determine the influence of the test conditions on the measured properties (the hardness, the elastic modulus and the fracture toughness). Complementary characterizations of the fracture toughness and the Young modulus by other conventional methods were also made for comparison. For each glass, we varied the indentation peak load as follows (10 N, 5 N, 3 N) and the dwelling time at these loads (8 s, 16 s, 30 s). The loading and unloading rate was fixed at 2000 mN/min. For each test condition, the load-penetration curves were obtained. We found that the parameters of indentation influence slightly the hardness, the elastic modulus and the fracture toughness.