ABSTRACT

The basic objective of this chapter is to utilize the nanoindentation technique to evaluate nanohardness of shock-recovered fragments of a coarse-grain (≈10 μm), high-density (3.978 g⋅cc−1) alumina obtained after a carefully conducted flyer-plate shock experiment [1] at a shock pressure of 6.5 GPa and to examine whether the nanohardness was similar to or degraded in comparison to that of the as-sintered alumina ceramics. As a consequence of this effort, we report here for the first time a new explanation for the presence of a strong indentation size effect (ISE) in shock-recovered alumina fragments obtained from an earlier study [1]. The details of the experimental methods have already been discussed in Chapter 9.