Failure by fracture and fatigue in "nano" and "bio" materials

Abstract

The behavior of nanostructured materials/small-volume structures and biological/bio-implantable materials, so-called "nano" and "bio" materials, is currently much in vogue in materials science. One aspect of this field, which has to date received only limited attention, is their fracture and fatigue properties. In this paper, we examine two topics in this area, namely the premature fatigue failure of silicon-based micron-scale structures for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), and the fracture properties of mineralized tissue, specifically human bone.