Surface measurements are used extensively in many industries and research disciplines to characterize a material’s mechanical properties and strength without the need for traditional, time consuming, and expensive laboratory tests, or for large volumes of sample material. This paper briefly reviews indentation methodologies for index and physical properties measurements and then focuses on the implementation of a method of using the measured force versus time of an impact to infer mechanical properties. By relying only on the measurement of force versus time, the method greatly simplifies the measurement process and thus allows for applications requiring rapid and automated measurements of both elastic stiffness and/or inelastic deformation during indentation. The indenter tip geometry, free-fall height, and the mechanical model used to describe the interaction of the contact between the indenter and material are investigated through the analysis of measurements performed on a wide variety of materials including plastics, rocks, ceramics, and asphalt. It is shown that using a spherical tip the method can be used to provide measurements of the elastic stiffness by fitting the measured force versus time curves to predictions of quasi static elastic theory. We then show how conversion of the force–time data into force–displacement curves realizes a direct connection with the already established static indentation interpretation framework. Through the use of force–displacement interpretation, the method becomes applicable to arbitrary tip geometries and inelastic mechanical properties. Through illustrative examples, we show how the force–displacement data from an impact can be interrogated for critical parameters such as loading and unloading characteristics, and maximum, residual, and elastic displacement.

许多行业和研究学科广泛使用表面测量来表征材料的机械性能和强度，而无需进行传统、耗时且昂贵的实验室测试，也无需大量样品材料。本文简要回顾了指数和物理特性测量的压痕方法，然后重点介绍了使用测量的冲击力与时间的关系来推断机械特性的方法的实施。通过仅依赖于力与时间的测量，该方法大大简化了测量过程，因此允许需要在压痕过程中对弹性刚度和/或非弹性变形进行快速和自动测量的应用。压头尖端几何形状、自由落体高度、通过对塑料、岩石、陶瓷和沥青等多种材料进行的测量分析，研究了用于描述压头与材料之间接触相互作用的机械模型。结果表明，使用球形尖端，该方法可用于通过将测得的力与时间曲线拟合到准静态弹性理论的预测来提供弹性刚度的测量值。然后我们展示了如何将力-时间数据转换为力-位移曲线，实现与已经建立的静态压痕解释框架的直接联系。通过使用力-位移解释，该方法适用于任意尖端几何形状和非弹性机械特性。通过说明性的例子，