A Novel Data Analysis Procedure for Spherical Nanoindentation

Advances in increased reliability of materials depend greatly on the details of their microstructure and the precise relationship between microstructure and mechanical properties becomes even more critical as device dimensions continue to decrease from micron to nanoscale dimensions. Currently, the successful development of a physics-based multi-scale materials model that can predict the device properties is largely hampered by lack of methods for characterizing reliably the local (anisotropic) properties of constituents in a composite material system at the appropriate length scales of interest. This PhD research was focused on developing a new approach that addresses this critical need by coupling the local mechanical response of a material, using spherical nanoindentation, with the structural information obtained at the same length scale. This method has been validated on a wide range of material systems including metals, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), ceramics and biomaterials indicating the versatility of this approach.

Autorentext

SP obtained his PhD from the Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia PA, USA in June 2009, and his Bachelors in Metallurgical Engineering from India 2003. He currently works as a post-doc at EMPA (Swiss Federal Institute for Materials Testing & Research), Thun, Switzerland.