The Vickers hardness test is a method of measuring the hardness of a material by pressing a diamond indenter into its surface and measuring the mark left behind. It was developed in 1921 by Robert L. Smith and George E. Sandland at Vickers Ltd as an alternative to the Brinell method. The indenter is a square-based diamond pyramid whose faces meet at an included angle of 136 degrees, chosen because it gives geometrically similar impressions at any load and matches the ideal Brinell impression size. Because the calculation does not depend on indenter size and one indenter serves every material, the test is often easier to use than other hardness tests and it covers one of the widest scales of any of them, for all metals. The result is the Vickers pyramid number, HV, also called diamond pyramid hardness, found as the applied force in kilograms-force divided by the surface area of the indentation, estimated from the mean diagonal length. Although expressed in units that resemble pressure, it is not a pressure.
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Lead [origin-year]
The Vickers hardness test was developed in 1921 by Robert L. Smith and George E. Sandland at Vickers Ltd
In Field: Materials Engineering, Lead
as an alternative to the Brinell method to measure the hardness of materials
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