Software Support for Evaluating the Hardness Tests of Construction Materials Used in Vehicles

The goal is to create a program for the automatic evaluation of hardness using a series of images taken by a charge-coupled camera (CCD). It will be explained the importance of materials testing for applications in vehicle design. We will present a specially developed program in Matlab to graphically display the surface hardness field of the object under study. The focus of the research is the evaluation of the hardness according to Vickers. In the first step, we developed an algorithm to select the image with the most appropriate sharpness from a series of images of different sharpness. In the second step, we created an algorithm that evaluated the imprint area in the selected image, from which the resulting hardness was calculated. Then we integrated the algorithms into a single resulting program. We compare the measurements of the program with measurements on an automatic ST-2000 Zwick Roell instrument and a manual V 10/HT instrument.