Contact area determination in indentation testing of elastomers

To evaluate mechanical properties by means of nanoindentation, information on the contact area is crucial. However, the contact area is not directly accessible in experiments and is usually calculated according to the Oliver and Pharr procedure, which turned out to be unsatisfying when applied to viscoelastic materials like polymers. In this study, complementary in situ indentation testing and finite element analysis (FEA) were performed on silicone elastomers. Through this combination of techniques, several individual error sources in the conventional contact area determination have been identified and quantified. For shallow penetrations, contact areas after Oliver and Pharr were up to 40% smaller than the in situ testing results; for larger penetrations, the contact size was overestimated by approximately 6%. The deviations of the resulting mechanical properties were approximately 10%. Viscoelastic effects could be captured if dynamic indentation testing was performed.