The demand for components more resistant to wear and corrosion has promoted a growing interest in the surface engineering that develops processes to improve the tribological properties of materials. The use of ceramic coating has been an option used to improve the surface of mechanical properties. However, it is necessary to use tests to evaluate the mechanical behavior of the film and its interface with the substrate, which requires sophisticated equipment, skilled labor and consequently expensive cost. As computer systems have been improving recently, the use of numerical analysis to solve many technological problems has been increasingly frequent and current. Consequently, it allows its implementation with a low cost. This paper proposes to use the Finite Element Method (FEM) to simulate the indentation test with spherical indenters in conjugated compounds of metal substrate and ceramic film with different thicknesses, using commercial software. However, the use of this numerical technique to evaluate the indentation testing also has had problems in obtaining the mechanical properties of the conjugate. In this work, the numerical model also includes the effects of friction between the penetrator and the film to analyze the fields of stresses and strains along the different penetration depths.
Hardness Testing; Thin Films; Finite Element; Friction Coefficient
