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A Membrane Deflection Fracture Experiment to Investigate Fracture Toughness of Freestanding MEMS Materials

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Abstract

This paper presents a novel Membrane Deflection Fracture Experiment (MDFE) to investigate the fracture toughness of MEMS and other advanced materials in thin film form. It involves the stretching of freestanding thin-film membranes, in a fixed-fixed configuration, containing pre-existing cracks. The fracture behavior of ultrananocrystalline diamond (UNCD), a material developed at Argonne National Laboratory, is investigated to illustrate the methodology. When the fracture initiates from sharp cracks, produced by indentation, the fracture toughness was found to be 4.7 MPa m1/2. When the fracture initiates from blunt notches with radii about 100 nm, machined by focused ion beam (FIB), the mean value of the apparent fracture toughness was found to be 7.2 MPa m1/2. Comparison of these two values, using the model proposed by Drory et al. [9], provides a correction factor of 2/3, which corresponds to a mean value of ρ/2x=1/2.

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Acknowledgements

This work was sponsored by the National Science Foundation under Career Award No. CMS-9624364 and under GOALI Award No. CMS-0120866/001. Work was also supported in part by the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Initiative of the National Science Foundation under NSF Award Number EEC-0118025 and by DOE Office of Science under contract No. N00014-97-1-0550. We thank Argonne National Laboratory for their support during the material processing. The authors would like to acknowledge N. Moldovan for assistance in the microfabrication of the specimens and many insightful suggestions.

Authors
  1. H. D. Espinosa
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  2. B. Peng
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Espinosa, H.D., Peng, B. A Membrane Deflection Fracture Experiment to Investigate Fracture Toughness of Freestanding MEMS Materials. MRS Online Proceedings Library 795, 294–300 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1557/PROC-795-U4.10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1557/PROC-795-U4.10

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