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In-Situ Fracture Tests Of Brittle Materials At The Microscale, Giorgio Sernicola, Giovannini Tommaso, Rui Hao, T. Ben Britton, Finn Giuliani

Nanomechanical Testing in Materials Research and Development V

The fracture toughness of ceramics is often dominated by the structure of their grain boundaries. Our ability to improve life of ceramic components depends on our ability to investigate properties of individual grain boundaries.

This requires development of new fracture testing methods allowing high spatial resolution and high control over the area to test. Further benefits of these ‘small scale’ approaches will enable testing of specimens for which big volumes are not available (e.g. thin films, coating, or simply samples of dimensions limited by production process).

Recently, several techniques have been developed using small scaled mechanical testing, based within a …