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I'm occationally asked about correlations between macroscopically and microscopically measured material properties, the typical case in question being the elastic modulus (or more like why don't they always match). Say you measure it using nanoindentation and in the other end you do something more traditional, like a tensile test. In many cases it's a necessity to go for nanoindentation (the case I'm blabbing about here involves typically coatings of nano & micrometer scale so there really ain't an abundance of methods available), and if you happen to be in luck, and have experimental data from several sources you can use to verify your measurements at least to some extent (i.e. there is sufficient comparability ... there are a bunch of things even material wise that make the comparison meaningless), in many cases you easily get differences of the order of tens of percents. I'm probably going to take an in-depth look at this 'cos it's starting to bug me quite a bit, but was wondering whether anyone has any information / experience with respect to the uniqueness of material properties when characterized this way ? The case property is elastic modulus, since it's something which in many cases is a problem overall no matter what method you're using, and it's also quite fundamental if doing e.g. detailed wear analyses or something like that.