Learning Forum

[Jason Moss]

I am not seeing a hardness spec in Ansys or Granta for Mechanical default Structural Steel.   

Does anyone know what this spec is, or do I need to simulate a standardized hardness test in Mechanical?

Thanks in advance.

[Sahil Sura]

Hello, jmoss,
Hardness in FEA is very rarely used for the cases as the calculates rarely take hardness into account while calculating the results.
Hardness is also a property in general that has different scales to measure and also does not have a perfect definition (It can be relatively defined by various methods and in different scales.)
Thus if you want to calculate the hardness of the default material, you might want to simulate the deformation with the standardized hardness test. The predefined material properties would be sufficient enough to get accurate deformation results required for further calculations if proper mesh and boundary conditions are defined.

Hope this helps!
Thanks,
Sahil
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[David Mercier]

Hi, usually in materials databases provided by Granta products, you can find values for Vickers or Brinell hardness. See an example below for a structural steel.

You have as well several examples/discussions on the forum about indentation:

• /forum/forums/topic/indentation-testing-trouble/
• /forum/forums/topic/cone-indentation-apdl/
• /forum/forums/topic/fe-modelling-of-nano-indentation/

But I agree with Sahil. Hardness is a scale dependent property (nanoindentation vs Vickers indentation???) and it is much more important to know the work hardening law of you steel + well definining contact + mesh.