This work presents a small-scale high-throughput technique to characterize the cyclic behavior of freestanding thin films. The technique consists of the microfabrication of a Si carrier composed of an array of grips and freestanding dogbone thin films and of the automated in situ Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) fatigue testing of the microfabricated carrier. The Si carrier functions as a nanomechanical testing device in which multiple dogbones can be simultaneously and independently tested under the same applied mechanical conditions. As a proof-of-concept, the fatigue behavior of nanocrystalline Al thin films was investigated. The technique allows for the simultaneous evaluation of crack nucleation and propagation across the fatigue life of several dogbones, facilitating the understanding of deformation mechanisms in nanocrystalline metals and providing statistically significant data. This technique reduces total testing time by orders of magnitude and allows for the investigation of the stochastic variability in fatigue failure. The current technique can be further expanded to account for different materials, new geometries and different loadings modes.
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Understanding fatigue damage progression and estimating remaining life of dynamically loaded components has been a major challenge for several safety critical in-service components. Towards this, a few small specimen fatigue test methods are available, such as, cyclic ball indentation, cyclic small punch test and cyclic bulge test etc. Cyclic ball indentation has the potential to be deployed in-situ during plant maintenance to record fatigue response of localized spots. The method uses a spherical indenter of 1/16” (~1.58 mm) diameter which applies cyclic compression-compression loading on the material at selected location and monitors the load-displacement response continuously to identify failure event due to fatigue.
To capture a complete picture of this, controlled experiments using carefully prepared dog bone fatigue specimens of SS 304 have been conducted. The dog bone specimen is fatigue cycled under tension-tension uni-axial loading till failure, with Acoustic Emission (AE) signature capture during fatigue cycling. the fatigue cycling is interrupted periodically and cyclic ball indentation tests are carried out again at some locations of gage length to identify failure life cycle data of fatigue cycled specimen through displacement sensing and hysteresis area. Data obtained from cyclic ball indentation is then correlated with loss of stiffness.
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The active grain boundary (GB) mediated mechanisms in ultrafine grained (ufg) Au and Al metallic films, and the extent to which they dictate plastic flow kinetics, are investigated in this work. The approach consists of a synergistic integration of in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) deformation experiments, nanomechanical testing, and transition state theory based atomistic modeling, in order to provide a linkage between GB-mediated dislocation processes and their deformation kinetics. The in situ TEM nanomechanical testing experiments are employed to simultaneously identify plastic deformation mechanisms, obtain key details, and measure the sample-level true activation volume in ufg thin films. The activation of relevant GB mediated dislocation mechanisms is modeled using the atomistic free-end nudged elastic band (FENEB) method as a function of representative, experimentally observed GB characters and local stress. Proper integration of experiments (sample-level true activation volume) and atomistic simulations (activation volumes of dislocation processes) to determine strength/rate-controlling mechanisms requires linking the applied stress to the local stress. To that end, a model of grain-size-dependent activation volume previously developed by Conrad is extended to account for the competition between various GB mediated mechanisms.
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