Correlation of Measured Load-Displacement Curves in Small Punch Tests with Tensile Stress-Strain Curves

The Small Punch Test (SPT) has demonstrated tremendous potential for high throughput evaluation of mechanical response of metal sheets. However, its application has thus far been limited to the estimation of plastic material properties such as yield strength and ultimate tensile strength. This paper demonstrates new analysis protocols for extracting the uniaxial stress-strain curves from the SPT measured load-displacement curves. This is accomplished by first establishing a correlation between the SPT measurements and corresponding finite element (FE) simulations that take as input the uniaxial stress-strain response of the material. After establishing this correlation, it is shown that the correlation can be inverted to estimate the uniaxial stress-strain response from the SPT load-displacement measurement on a new material sample.