Please choose your delivery country and your customer group
As part of a program to characterize the mechanical response of surface modified materials, a microhardness indentation test machine has been developed. An electromagnetic drive system controls a diamond indenter which is suspended on a low friction ball slide. The test specimen is mounted on a cantilevered arm in a vertical plane perpendicular to the indentation direction on an X-Y micrometer translation system. Tests are controlled with a 16-bit A/D closed loop digital controller/function generator designed for this system. Load is monitored with a strain gage load cell while displacement is measured with a set of capacitance probes. Load/depth/time data are stored on a digital oscilloscope which is linked to a DEC LSI 11/23 for subsequent processing. The system allows indentation loading up to 1 kg with load resolutions of 5 mg and a depth resolution of 10 nm.