Derivation of tensile flow characteristics for austenitic materials from instrumented indentation technique

In this study, a method for deriving the tensile flow characteristics of austenitic materials from an instrumented indentation technique is presented along with its experimental verification. We proposed a modified algorithm for austenitic materials that takes their hardening behaviour into account. First, the true strain based on sine function instead of tangent function was adapted. It was proved that the sine function shows constant degrees of hardening which is a main characteristic of the hardening of austenitic materials. Second, a simple and linear constitutive equation was newly suggested to optimize indentation flow curves. The modified approach was experimentally verified by comparing tensile properties of five austenitic materials from uniaxial tensile test and instrumented indentation tests.