One of the primary features of nano-indentation technique is that the contact area induced by an indenter is indirectly measured by a relationship between the penetration depth and the known geometry of the indenter. However, this indirect measurement occasionally leads to inaccurate properties of the indented material. The objective of this study is to investigate the effects of E/σr and the s...

This study is aimed to develop a novel noncontact ultrasonic indentation system for measuring quantitative mechanical properties of soft tissues, which are increasingly important for tissue assessment and characterization. The key idea of this method is to use a water jet as an indenter to compress the soft tissue while at the same time as a medium for an ultrasound beam to propagate through. T...

Detecting and localizing hard lumps in soft tissues is an important medical procedure. A psychophysics experiment measured minimum indentation forces required to detect a hard ball embedded in a soft rubber model. Ball size and finger indentation speed were varied. Threshold detection forces increased with ball size and decreased with indentation speed. The shape of the finger and contact press...

Nix and Gao established an important relation between microindentation hardness and indentation depth. Such a relation has been verified by many microindentation experiments (indentation depths in the micrometer range), but it does not always hold in nanoindentation experiments (indentation depths approaching the nanometer range). We have developed a unified computational model for both microan...

The indentation slope curve from a spherical indentation on elastic-plastic materials is examined. By comparing it with that of an linear elastic material of the same elastic properties, we found that the start point of plastic yielding for an elastic-plastic material can be easily located from the indentation slope curve. Based on this analysis, a simple but effective method is proposed tomeas...

Indentation methods are finding increasing use in the study of mechanical properties of bulk and thin-film materials over a wide range of size scales (e.g., [1,2]). With the increasing sophistication of instrumented, depth-sensing indentation equipment and of computational methods to model the deformation of materials subjected to indentation, there is growing interest in studying the elastopla...

The force-depth behavior of indentation into fibrillar-structured surfaces such as those consisting of forests of microor nanoscale tubes or rods is a depth-dependent behavior governed by compression, bending, and buckling of the nanotubes. Using a micromechanical model of the indentation process, the effective elastic properties of the constituent tubes or rods as well as the effective propert...

Bone fragility is a concern for aged and diseased bone. Measuring bone toughness and understanding fracture properties of the bone are critical for predicting fracture risk associated with age and disease and for preclinical testing of therapies. A reference point indentation technique (BioDent) has recently been developed to determine bone's resistance to fracture in a minimally invasive way b...

Psychophysical tests on human subjects showed that judgments of skin indentation depth made when the fingertip was indented at rates from 0.2 to 16 mm/sec were quite insensitive to changes in indentation velocity. Similar results were obtained on the forearm at indentation velocities of 0.4 to 16 mm/sec. Recordings were made from mechanoreceptors in the monkey's hand that were able to respond o...

introduction: nano-indentation has recently been employed as a powerful tool for determining the mechanical properties of biological tissues on nano and micro scales. a majority of soft biological tissues such as ligaments and tendons exhibit viscoelastic or time-dependent behaviors. the constitutive characterization of soft tissues is among very important subjects in clinical medicine and espe...