PhyBaLCHT – Influence of indentation force on the results of cyclic hardness tests and investigations of comparability to uniaxial fatigue loading

Abstract Short-time procedures for determining the fatigue properties of materials can provide significant improvements in cost efficiency and are therefore of great scientific and industrial interest (Jost et al., 2017). A promising short-time procedure is PhyBaLCHT, which is based on cyclic indentation tests and can be used to determine the cyclic hardening potential of different materials at different conditions (Kramer et al., 2014; Bambach et al., 2016). In the present research work, this procedure was used to explore the cyclic hardening potential of 42CrMo4 steel (SAE 4140) in various heat treatment states as well as of 18CrNiMo7-6 steel variants with different chemical composition and heat treatments. A special focus of the investigation was the influence of maximum indentation force on the results determined with PhyBaLCHT. As expected, a higher dependency on local effects is seen at lower indentation forces. However, consistent values of cyclic hardening potential were determined down to low indentation forces, and indent diagonals below 5 µm. This gives perspective to describe e.g. gradients in material cyclic deformation behavior with high local resolution. Furthermore, the results of cyclic indentation tests were compared to the results of uniaxial cyclic compression tests, showing transferability of the cyclic indentation tests to the cyclic deformation behavior under uniaxial cyclic loading.