Mechanical characterization of additively manufactured microstructures using a process integrated MEMS tensile tester

Abstract

With the rapid growth of additive manufacturing technologies, mechanical characterization of printed structures is becoming increasingly important to ensure their suitability as functional components. However, characterization of microstructures is traditionally compression testing due to handling challenges of at-scale parts. To overcome that limitation, we have designed, fabricated, and tested custom microelectromechanical system (MEMS) tensile tester that enables direct integration with additively manufactured (AM) parts with nm displacement resolution and mN force range. This work characterizes the mechanical behavior of two AM parts stitched together. At yield, the failure strain is 3.1%, which is 3x lower than under compression.