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