Deformation Characteristics in Micromachining of Single Crystal 6H-SiC: Insight into Slip Systems Activation

Abstract

Silicon carbide (SiC) is ideally suitable as a sensor material in harsh environments. Despite the brittleness in the macroscopic scale, plasticity in SiC is observed at small component length-scales. Previous nanoindentation based study combining experiment and numerical approaches of single-crystal 6H-SiC has shown that slip activation is rather complex, and that non-basal slip could potentially dominate the plastic deformation behaviour. In this study, we investigated the local deformation response evolution of shear strain directly under and in the vicinity of the indenter tip. The results show the pyramidal slip families contribute significantly to the deformation process.