Residual stress determination using nanoindentation technique

Abstract

Residual stress is defined as the stress that remains in a material without an external load being applied to the material. It originates from the misfits between regions and exists widely in the devices and components for various engineering applications, such as thin films and lines deposited on substrates in microelectronic and optoelectronic devices and components, surface coatings designed to influence optical, magnetic, thermal, environmental, and tribological performance, and joined components [49, 67]. The existing residual stress field in these components has a strong effect on their performance and plays a vital role in their failure behavior. Thus, determination of residual stress field is very important in both scientific and technological perspectives. Various methods have been developed to measure the residual stresses in materials, such as neutron and X-ray tilt [16], beam bending, hole drilling [12], layer removal [35], indentation crack [31] and methods using nanoindentation technique. Among all these methods, the methodologies based on nanoindentation technique have recently attracted extensive research attentions [1-3, 8, 19, 25-27, 39, 40, 42-44, 47, 50, 56, 57, 62, 64-66]. Unlike the other methods, nanoindentation technique has the capability of deforming materials at a very small scale and allows the determination of residual stresses to be performed at micro/nanoscale. The purpose of this chapter is to summarize the recent research efforts on the determination of residual stress using nanoindentation technique. Emphasis is placed on the influence of residual stress on nanoindentation behavior and the various methodologies developed on the basis of nanoindentation technique. Discussion on the limitation of each method has been also given where it is appropriate. Future research directions have also been pointed out after the summary of state-of-art nanoindentation technique for residual stress measurement. © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, 2008.