Instrumented Indentation Technique (IIT) is widely used to determine the mechanical properties of materials. The elastic modulus is usually determined by applying the methodology proposed by Oliver and Pharr [1] who supposed that its value is independent of the indentation depth. However, some authors [2, 3] have observed a decrease of the elastic modulus when the indenter displacement increases which allowed them to introduce a continuous damage theory used afterwards to estimate the fracture toughness of ductile materials. The assumption made by the authors is that a damage in the region very close to the bottom of the indent results in the formation of microvoids which leads to the variation of the elastic modulus as a function of the indenter displacement. Starting from this observation, Lee et al. [2] proposed an energy model based on the Griffith’s theory and the continuous damage mechanics (CDM) which states that the elastic modulus variation is related to the fraction void volume through a variable damage, introduced by Kachanov [4], related to the surface density of the microdefects. On the other hand, the works carried out over ductile materials by Li et al. [3] have been performed only with nanoindentation data preventing a discussion on the scale-‐effect. (...
