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Brinell hardness test
Sign in to saveAlso known as Brinell scale, HB, Ball indentation hardness, hardness, Brinell test
The way to measure the hardness of a material is with a special tool called an indenter, which is pressed into the material and the larger the cavity, the harder the material.
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Encyclopedic overview
Force diagram
The Brinell hardness test (pronounced /brəˈnɛl/) measures the indentation hardness of materials. It determines hardness through the scale of penetration of an indenter, loaded on a material test-piece. It is one of several definitions of hardness in materials science. The hardness scale is expressed in terms of a Brinell hardness value, sometimes referred to as the Brinell hardness number but formally expressed as HBW (Hardness Brinell Wolfram – Wolfram being an alternative name for the tungsten carbide ball indenter used during the test).
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Brinell hardness test” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.