CRACKING DURING NANOINDENTATION AND ITS USE IN THE

MEASUREMENT OF THE FRACTURE TOUGHNESS

1) Abstract: The fracture toughness of a thin film or small volume can be determined in
nanoindentation experiments are reported. The problem encountered is that there are
well defined loads, called cracking thresholds, below which indentation cracking does
not occur in most brittle materials. It can be solved by using a sharper indenter
geometry like a cube-corner.

2) Introduction: The Nanoindentation has been used to characterize elastic properties

such as the modulus E, plastic properties such as the hardness H, and time dependent
properties, such as the stress exponent for creep n.

Method is based on radial cracking in which the length of radial cracks have been
found to correlate reasonably well with fracture toughness and a simple semi-
empirical method has been developed to compute the toughness from the crack
lengths. There is a simple empirical relation between the fracture toughness, Kc, and
the lengths of the radial crack, c, of the form:
0.5 ❑
E P
Kc=α∗ ( ) ( )
H
∗
c 1.5

Here, P is the peak indentation load and α is an empirical constant which depends on
the geometry of the indenter and E and H can be determined directly from the
analyses of nanoindentation load-displacement data.