When considering polymeric materials for the components design, their behaviour
under external actions (mechanical, temperature, time, etc.) must be known. Thus,
the study of their mechanical properties is essential if these materials are going to
use as structural elements. The traditional mechanical tests, as tensile test or
dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA), are widely used to determining the mechanical
properties of bulk polymers or films. However, when these materials are used as
coatings or when the available component volume is limited, the traditional tests are
not suitable to determining the mechanical behaviour. Depth sensing indentation test
is a technique that allows obtaining the mechanical properties of a component, at
surface level, even for very small samples.
In this work the possibility of using depth sensing indentation technique to
characterize amorphous polymers was explore. The results were compared with
those obtained by DMA
