The interaction between Lateral size effect and grain size when scratching polycrystalline copper using a Berkovich indenter

It has been reported previously that, for single and polycrystalline copper (fcc), the indentation size effect and the grain size effect (GSE) can be combined in a single length-scale-dependent deformation mechanism linked to a characteristic length-scale calculable by a dislocation-slip-distance approach (X. D. Hou and N. M. Jennett, ‘Application of a modified slip-distance theory to the indentation of single-crystal and polycrystalline copper to model the interactions between indentation size and structure size effects,’ Acta Mater., Vol. 60, pp. 4128–4135, 2012). Recently, we identified a ‘lateral size effect (LSE)’ in scratch hardness measurements in single crystal copper, where the scratch hardness increases when the scratch size is reduced (A. Kareer, X. D. Hou, N. M. Jennett and S. V. Hainsworth ‘The existence of a lateral size effect and the relationship between indentation and scratch hardness’ Philos. Mag. published online 24 March 2016). This paper investigates the effect of grain size on the scratch hardness of polycrystalline copper with average grain sizes between 1.2 and 44.4 μm, when using a Berkovich indenter. Exactly the same samples are used as in the indentation investigation by Hou et al. (‘Application of a modified slip-distance theory to the indentation of single-crystal and polycrystalline copper to model the interactions between indentation size and structure size effects,’ Acta Mater., Vol. 60, pp. 4128–4135, 2012). It is shown that, not only does the scratch hardness increase with decreasing grain size, but that the GSE and LSE combine in reciprocal length (as found previously for indentation) rather than as a superposition of individual stresses. Applying the same (as indentation) dislocation-slip-distance-based size effect model to scratch hardness yielded a good fit to the experimental data, strongly indicating that it is the slip-distance-like combined length-scale that determines scratch hardness. A comparison of the fit parameters obtained by indentation and scratch on the same samples is made and some distinct differences are identified. The most striking difference is that scratch hardness is over four times more sensitive to grain size than is indentation hardness.