Technical Papers and Presentations

Instrumented indentation is increasingly used as an alternative non-destructive test method to measure mechanical properties of small volumes of materials. In this work, the instrumented indentation test is applied as a non-destructive method to assess the mechanical properties of TiAl components during the setup of a real production process. This study is a preliminary contribution devoted to the development of a suitable computer model to assess an integral methodology which combines indentation experiments with computer simulations. The proposed model using COMSOL is a highly non linear contact structural analysis having a strong singularity at the indenter tip. It utilizes an elasto-plastic constitutive law combined with an experimental indentation stress-strain curve to describe the actual mechanical behaviour of TiAl alloys. The latter is constructed using samples (i.e. disks) of pre-specified composition and microstructure taken from the real process.