Modelling and Simulations of Nanoindentation in Single Crystals

Abstract

Modelling of micro-/nano-indentation of single crystals has been developed extensively to elucidate experimentally observed features such as the size effect, pile-up phenomenon and lattice rotations. The indentation size effect (ISE) of three types of single crystals, i.e. f.c.c. copper single crystal, b.c.c. ß phase of Ti-6Al-4V (ß-Ti-64) and b.c.c. ß phase of Ti-15V-3Cr-3Al-3Sn (ß-Ti-15-3-3-3), is investigated using finite-element analysis. In indentation modelling, an idealised conical indenter and spherical indenters were chosen to study the effects of indenter's geometry on the mechanical response of the tested material. A crystal plasticity model was used to describe the material's behaviour of these single crystals during nanoindentation. In this chapter, a conventional single-crystal plasticity (SCP) model and the mechanism-based strain-gradient crystal-plasticity (MSGCP) model were employed to compare and contrast the (de)merits of the types of crystal plasticity models. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.