A new approach to measure the elastic–plastic properties of bulk materials using spherical indentation

Spherical indentation has the potential for measuring the elastic–plastic properties of a power-law hardening bulk specimen with just one simple test. In this paper, based on a new definition of representative strain, a set of dimensionless functions that relate the indentation characteristics and material properties are established by means of extensive finite element analyses. A new numerical algorithm of reverse analysis is proposed to extract the elastic–plastic properties of bulk materials from one indentation test. This method is applicable to a wide range of power-law hardening materials. Good agreement is found between the material properties obtained from the reverse analysis of the new approach and experimental data.