Cyclic hardness test PHYBALCHT – Short-time procedure to evaluate fatigue properties of metallic materials

•PHYBALCHT is a new short-time procedure using cyclic hardness indentation tests.•A force indentation-depth hysteresis can be measured for each indentation cycle N.•Hardening-exponentCHT correlates with cyclic hardening in constant amplitude tests.•PHYBALCHT is well suited to characterize fatigue properties of metallic materials.

The evaluation of fatigue properties of metallic materials with conventional methods requires time and cost consuming experiments. That is why a new short-time procedure named PHYBALCHT was developed at the Institute of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Kaiserslautern. This method requires only a planar material surface to perform cyclic force-controlled hardness indentation tests. To characterize fatigue properties of metallic materials the change of the force-indentation-depth-hysteresis has to be plotted versus the number of indentation cycles (N). In analogy to the plastic strain amplitude which is used to characterize the cyclic deformation behavior the indentation-depth width of the hysteresis loop is specified as plastic indentation-depth amplitude (ha,p). This parameter is well suited to characterize fatigue properties of metallic materials.

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