characterize material response in a wide range of engineering applications. The technique has been used
extensively for determining hardness, which has been related to mechanical properties of materials (e.g., yield
stress, tensile strength, work-hardening rate, wear resistance, and fracture toughness of brittle materials), for
evaluating the effectiveness of heat treatment processes and surface modification techniques, and for measuring
the adhesive strength of thick films and surface coatings. A comprehensive review on static hardness testing
and its applications is available in Ref 1, 2, 3 and in the section “Hardness Testing” in this Volume.
Indentation hardness is defined as the intensity of the indentation load (i.e., indentation load over the projected
area of the indentation imprint). Depending upon its intended application, indentation hardness has been
interpreted broadly. For a machinist, hardness is a measure of resistance to cutting, for a metallurgist, it is
resistance to penetration, and for a tribologist, it is resistance to wear. All these definitions relate to a material's
resistance to permanent deformation (i.e., a measure of yield stress in metals and fracture strength in brittle
ceramics). Therefore, static hardness basically refers to plastic properties that are indirectly derived (or related)
through this method without laborious specimen preparation. However, it is well established in high-strain-rate
literature (e.g., Ref 4) that plastic properties of materials are strongly a function of strain rate for a vast majority
of materials.
The use of static hardness as a measure of yield stress, for example, in a high-speed machining process or under
high-velocity impact applications, may not be appropriate. This is because in a static indentation hardness test,
a predetermined indentation load is applied over 5 to 15 s, causing an imprint of the indenter on a given
material. The rate of deformation (or strain rate) during this test is typically of the order of 10
-5
/s. A machinist
may use this hardness data for selecting suitable process parameters, such as speed, feed, tooling, and so on, to
effectively perform a desired machining operation on a workpiece. Note that the selection of process parameters
is based on a static measure, whereas in a high-speed machining operation, material removal occurs in less than
several hundred microseconds, resulting in a strain rate in excess of 10
3
/s. This strain rate is at least 5 to 6
orders of magnitude greater than that achieved in a static indentation test. At such high strain rates, it is well
established that the inelastic properties of materials are considerably different from their quasi-static
counterparts. For example, metals exhibit an increase in yield strength (Ref 4, 5), and ceramics exhibit an
increase in fracture strength (e.g., Ref 6, 7, 8, 9) and fracture toughness (Ref 10, 11).
Similar situations also may arise while characterizing impact and dynamic wear behavior of materials where the
deformation rates are several orders of magnitude greater than that achieved in a typical static indentation or
uniaxial tension test. In addition, high-strain-rate deformation also results in a significant rise in temperature
due to the adiabatic nature of deformation and strongly influences the plastic response, which also is not
captured in a static indentation test where isothermal conditions prevail during the deformation. Under such
circumstances, use of dynamic hardness where the indentation load is applied in microsecond duration may lead
to a more accurate assessment of material behavior and process parameter selection.
Recently, there has been an increased interest in dynamic indentation technique because of its ability to predict
dynamic plastic properties of materials at high strain rates (>10
3
/s). Such studies have considerable relevance in
the analysis of structures subjected to impact, high-velocity sliding wear, crash, and so on. For example, in the
field of wear of materials, Meng and Ludema (Ref 12) pointed out that 28 generic erosion models have been
used to predict the wear properties of materials. Several inelastic properties such as hardness, yield strength,
and fracture toughness appear in a majority of these equations. However, the exponent of the velocity term in
these models has been observed to range between 2 and 5. Based on the momentum considerations, these
authors argue that the velocity exponent should be around 2. One of the reasons for the observed variability is
rationalized in terms of inappropriate use of static properties. Since wear is a dynamic process, they suggest the
use of dynamic materials properties, such as dynamic hardness, dynamic strength, and dynamic fracture
toughness, which they speculate could make a difference by a factor of 10 in estimating the wear rates.
Although several established techniques, such as split Hopkinson pressure bar and plate-impact experiments,
exist to evaluate the properties of materials at high strain rates, none of these techniques offer the ease and
simplicity that parallel a typical hardness test. Therefore, several approaches have been adopted to evaluate
indentation hardness in time scales much shorter than a few seconds. This article describes a method (based on
split Hopkinson pressure bar testing) for determining the dynamic indentation response of metals and ceramics.
This method of dynamic indentation testing can determine rate-dependent characteristics of metals and
ceramics at moderate strain rates. For example, dynamic indentation testing reveals a significant effect of
loading rates on the hardness and the induced plastic zone size in metals and the hardness and induced crack
sizes of brittle materials.