Informativeness Improvement of Hardness Test Methods for Metal Product Assessment

The paper presents a combination of theoretical suggestions, results, and observations allowing to improve the informativeness of hardness testing process in solving problems of metal product assessment while in operation. The hardness value of metal surface obtained by a single measurement is considered to be random. Various measures of location and scattering of the random variable were experimentally estimated for a number of test samples using the correlation analysis, and their close interaction was studied. It was stated that in metal assessment, the main informative characteristics of hardness testing process are its average value and mean-square deviation for measures of location and scattering, respectively.