A material’s resistance to localized permanent deformation is gauged by its hardness. Plastic deformation is another name for permanent distortion. When a material deforms elastically, it does so only when force is applied; whereas, when a material deforms plastically, it does not change back to its previous shape.

Varied types of loading cause different behaviours from materials. For instance, a metal that can withstand a significant one-time impact very well could not behave the same way under continual loads.

To make an informed decision for the application, hardness testing must be done in each scenario.

Scratch, rebound, and indentation hardness are the three different types of hardness. Each sort of hardness can only be measured with a certain set of tools.

Also, the same material will have different hardness values for the types mentioned above.

The commonly used units for hardness measurement are:

• Brinell Hardness Number (HB)
• Vickers hardness number (HV)
• Rockwell hardness number (HRA, HRB, HRC, etc)

The minimum measuring unit of NextGen’s Macro Vickers Hardness Tester – Analogue, Digital and Digital with CCD Optical Analysis Software is 0.1μm.

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