Portable Hardness Tester - A Device to Measure Abrasion of Metals
The use of handheld hardness testers is done when the sample that needs to be tested cannot be brought out of the site and requires on-site testing. If the sample size is too big, you should be ideally looking at using portable hardness testers. Some of the tested materials include aluminium alloys and profiles, sheets, tubes, and copper and brass products.
To carry out a portable hardness test, unlike the conventional testing methods, the test piece is not required to be brought to the tester. On the contrary, it is the opposite that happens. The popular methods use either the Vickers-diamond tip or the rebound method.
One of the other commonly used method to test the hardness of a test piece is abrasion testing. In this case, the tester consists of a rotating disk that moves against the test piece. The rate at which the sample starts to wear becomes a measure of its hardness.
There are three types of abrasions – flat, edge and flex. Abrasion or wear rates need to be known in industrial applications to enhance the service life of certain parts of machinery. Abrasion testing is often done to ensure that the wear rate of the various parts is normal and to check if there is any abnormality that needs to be rectified. A portable hardness test is a reliable method of understanding the wear rate in materials and is hence quite widely used in different industries.
The hardness of a material is usually associated with the resistance to wear and tear or abrasion of the material. Therefore, in many industrial applications, a portable hardness test is carried out through the abrasion and erosion testing methods. Though the method is slower than the indentation tests, the resistance to abrasion still becomes a measure of how hard the material is.
The principle of the portable hardness tester is based on the fact that when the abrasive particle presents in the tester and the wear surface of the test piece is in contact, the speed and the direction between the surfaces determine the hardness of the material.
