Hardness is defined as the resistance of a material to localized plastic deformation. Owing to their non-destructive nature, static indentation hardness tests are widely used in industry. Hardness testing is particularly useful for the mechanical characterization of materials that cannot be tested otherwise, e.g. powdered materials. In this study, challenges related to Vickers microindentation hardness testing of hard brittle cast tungsten carbide (CTC) powders were extensively investigated. Test load was optimized to obtain sufficiently large crack-free indentations allowing for precise measurement of the diagonal lengths. The influence of the operator and imaging technique on the measured hardness value was evaluated. Topography of residual imprints was investigated using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and a systematic and operator bias-free method to locate the indentation vertexes was developed. Results suggested that measurement variability introduced by AFM scanning and post-processing was as low as 3.1% and 1.3% with respect to the mean hardness value, respectively. Since the variability due to the measuring system can be isolated, the homogeneity of powders can be reliably evaluated from the hardness measurements thus obtained.

Cast tungsten carbide (CTC) is a biphasic, pearlitic-like structure composed of WC lamellae in a matrix of W₂C. Besides excellent flowability, spherical CTC powders exhibit superior hardness and wear resistance. Nevertheless, the available literature generally fails to explain the physical mechanisms behind such a phenomenon. In the present work, the microstructure and the mechanical properties of the novel centrifugally-atomized spherical CTC have been extensively investigated. This material exhibited an extremely fine microstructure, with WC lamellae of 27-29 nm in thickness and bulk lattice strains of 1.0-1.4 %, resulting in a microindentation hardness of 31.4 ± 1.6 GPa. The results of this study clearly show that centrifugally-atomized CTC is mechanically superior to both spheroidized CTC and conventional cast-and-crushed CTC. In addition, the effect of a series of heat treatments on the bulk fracture toughness and the fatigue life of entire CTC particles was also investigated. The reduction of residual stresses in the bulk of particles upon annealing dramatically increased the indentation fracture toughness, whereas the bulk microindentation hardness remained essentially unaffected. Regarding the fatigue life of entire particles under uniaxial cyclic compressive loading, local phase transformation phenomena at the surface of the particles upon heat treatment were concluded to play the most critical role. Indeed, the cumulative fatigue damage was minimized in surface-carburized CTC powders, where compressive stresses were induced at the outermost surface.