Elastic-plastic properties of thin film on elastic-plastic substrates characterized by nanoindentation test

To characterize the elastic-plastic properties of thin film materials on elastic-plastic substrates, a simple theory model was proposed, which included three steps: dimensionless analysis, finite element modeling and data fitting. The dimensionless analysis was applied to deriving two preliminary nondimensional relationships of the material properties, and finite element modeling and data fitting were carried out to establish their explicit forms. Numerical indentation tests were carried out to examine the effectiveness of the proposed model and the good agreement shows that the proposed theory model can be applied in practice.