Surface Hardness Laboratory
This laboratory provides facilities to characterise the hardness of materials on varies length scales. Depending on how high loads are we distinguish between
- Macrohardness
- Microhardness
- Nanohardness
The laboratory is open to the users of our large scale synchrotron X-ray and neutron beam lines. Typical applications include:
- Macroscopic plastic behaviour of engineering materials (steel, aluminium, etc.)
- Local variations of hardness across grains or inclusions in engineering materials, thin films, photovoltaic layers etc
Three devices are available
Macrohardness tester
- Brinell hardness
- force: 1 kgf to 62.5 kgf
Mikrohardness tester MHT-10 (Anton Paar)
- Vickers hardness
- force: 0,5 gf to 400 gf
- holding time: 15 s, 20 s, 30 s
- prerequisites: well-polished surface
Picodentor Hm500 (Fischer)
- Martens hardness HM, Vickers hardness HV, elastic parameters (DIN EN ISO 14577-1)
- force: max. 500mN
- penetration depth: max. 150 µm
- prerequisites: very well prepared and flat/parallel surface