Scale effects for strength, ductility, and toughness in "brittle” materials

Decreasing scales effectively increase nearly all important mechanical properties of at least some "brittle” materials below 100 nm. With an emphasis on silicon nanopillars, nanowires, and nanospheres, it is shown that strength, ductility, and toughness all increase roughly with the inverse radius of the appropriate dimension. This is shown experimentally as well as on a mechanistic basis using a proposed dislocation shielding model. Theoretically, this collects a reasonable array of semiconductors and ceramics onto the same field using fundamental physical parameters. This gives proportionality between fracture toughness and the other mechanical properties. Additionally, this leads to a fundamental concept of work per unit fracture area, which predicts the critical event for brittle fracture. In semibrittle materials such as silicon, this can occur at room temperature when the scale is sufficiently small. When the local stress associated with dislocation nucleation increases to that sufficient to break bonds, an instability occurs resulting in fractur

Quantitative electromechanical characterization of materials using conductive ceramic tips

The electromechanical properties of metallic and semiconductor materials are investigated in situ using hard, electrically conductive, vanadium carbide Berkovich tips fitted to a nanoindenter. We demonstrate that, for tip contact radii from 100 nm up to about 1 μm, quantitative electrical data can be successfully obtained from the through-tip resistive measurements simultaneously with mechanical measurements. We outline a procedure for measuring the various resistive components of the electrical circuit that enables sample resistivity and other contact parameters to be evaluated with high precision during mechanical testing. The procedure requires that the tip-to-sample and sample-to-stage electrical contacts exhibit linear (ohmic) I-V characteristics. A gold electrical calibration standard is recommended, as well as a priori measurement of the tip area curves as a function of contact radius

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