A Novel Data Analysis Procedure for Spherical Nanoindentation

Advances in increased reliability of materials depend greatly on the details of their microstructure – and the precise relationship between microstructure and mechanical properties becomes even more critical as device dimensions continue to decrease from micron to nanoscale dimensions. Currently, the successful development of a physics-based multi-scale materials model that can predict the device properties is largely hampered by lack of methods for characterizing reliably the local (anisotropic) properties of constituents in a composite material system at the appropriate length scales of interest. This PhD research was focused on developing a new approach that addresses this critical need by coupling the local mechanical response of a material, using spherical nanoindentation, with the structural information obtained at the same length scale. This method has been validated on a wide range of material systems including metals, carbon nanotubes (CNTs), ceramics and biomaterials – indicating the versatility of this approach.