EUROPEAN CONGRESS AND EXHIBITION ON ADVANCED MATERIALS AND PROCESSES - EUROMAT 2021

Microcomponents, such as microchips, actuators and sensors, are often based on metallic thin films that must endure cyclic thermomechanical loading during their lifetime. The mechanical properties of these thin films are usually different from bulk materials and their thermomechanical fatigue mechanisms are poorly unknown. For this reason, an advanced bulge test setup was developed to cyclically load thin films at controlled temperature between 25°C and 100°C. It is demonstrated that this setup can successfully run fatigue tests in the low cycle fatigue (LCF) and up to the high cycle fatigue (HCF) regime. The contribution will present preliminary results achieved on 150 nm gold thin films. They aim at characterizing their fatigue properties as a function of the microstructure, temperature and stress amplitude.