Brinell Hardness Testers The oldest hardness test in common use is frequently employed to measure the hardness of forgings and castings.
The test is performed by pressing a steel, or tungsten ball indenter on a well prepared sample surface under specific load.
The resulting indentation is measured by scaled eyepiece or through a specific analyzing software and converted in the HB scale.
Typically, a 10, 5, 2.5 or 1mm diameter sphere indenter with kgf to 3000kgf load is used for the test, smaller spheres and low loads are used for softer materials tests.
For harder materials the tungsten sphere is used.
The Brinell hardness is expressed as HB and must be followed by the test conditions.
These standards are two HBS when steel ball indenters are used, or HBW when tungsten indenter is used. These units are followed by XX/YYYY where XX is the ball diameter in mm and YYYY is the applied load in kgf.