At PMI Specialists, we deliver precise and reliable hardness testing services for metallic materials, ensuring compliance with quality standards and performance requirements. Our fully equipped metallurgical lab and skilled professionals provide accurate results for a wide range of applications, from manufacturing verification to failure analysis.

Hardness testing measures a material’s resistance to deformation, typically through indentation. This property is essential for evaluating material strength, wear resistance, and heat treatment effectiveness. It plays a critical role in quality assurance, material selection, and root-cause failure investigations.

We perform hardness testing on:

• Raw materials
• Heat-treated component
• Weld zones
• Surface coatings and treatments

By performing hardness testing on metals and alloys, we can quantify many of the material’s properties such as: ultimate tensile strength, heat treatment condition and welding quality. All hardness testing machines at PMI Specialists are calibrated to meet ISO 17025 standards and ensure accurate results.

Rockwell is the most commonly used metal hardness scale. PMI Specialists tests on the HRB and HRC scales based on ASTM E18 standard.

For microhardness, PMI Specialists performs automatic Vickers and Knoop microhardness testing with indentation loads from 0.1 to 10 kg based on ASTM standard E384. Microhardness is considered non-destructive compared to Rockwell or Brinell testing. It is very useful on small sized samples or coatings. Microhardness is also extensively used to characterize case hardening properties, carburization depth, secondary phase particles and weld profile (weld metal, heat affected zone and base metal).