Modeling of Micro-Hardness in the Au-Doped YBCO Bulk Superconductors

In this study, in order to investigate the effect of Au doping on mechanical properties of YBCO, Au-doped (from x = 1 wt% to x = 20 wt%) and pure YBa2Cu3O7-x samples were prepared by standard solid-state reaction method. The indentation load versus diagonal length of the samples under various indentation loads in the range of 0.245–2.940 N is measured. The micro-indentation measurements showed that the load-dependent micro-hardness value for Au-doped samples is lower in comparison with that of the pure sample. The values of the hardness are found to be load and Au content-dependent. For each sample, the reverse indentation size effect (RISE) is observed in which micro-hardness value increased with increasing the load. In addition, we extract the load-independent (true) micro-hardness using Meyer’s law, Kick’s law, proportional specimen resistance, modified proportional specimen resistance, the Hays-Kendall, and the indentation-induced cracking (IIC) models and compare the true hardness with the apparent hardness. Among the investigated models, IIC model is determined to be the most successful one describing the mechanical properties of our samples.