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Attempts have been made to correlate the scratch behavior and basic material
properties of polymers and a correlation has been established between the scratch
damage, the bulk response and the friction coefficient. The scratch behavior of a
thermoset solid polymer exhibiting brittle behavior in tension was investigated to
determine how the behavior of the bulk material affects the scratch resistance.
The surfaces were scratched under progressive scratch loading and an imaging
system was used to record real time photographs of the in-situ contact area and
scratch damage corresponding to cracking near the rear edge of the contact. The
3D crack pattern has been analyzed using fluorescence confocal laser scanning
microscopy. A finite element simulation gave an estimation of the contact loading
used as input data for the 3D crack network onset and development analysis based
on 3D localized multigrid X-FEM techniques. The level sets functions are defined
from the measured crack geometry. A set of 11 localized multigrid meshes are
used to focus on the cracked and contact areas.