A nanoscale composite material for enhanced damage tolerance in micro and nano-electro-mechanical systems and structures

A laminar composite material with alternating layers of residual compressive and tensile stresses has previously been shown to offer enhanced tolerance to fracture in macroscale ceramic components. In this work, a similarly damage-tolerant composite material with micro and nano-scale laminae has been developed as an alternative to monolithic silicon for the fabrication of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS).; The motivation for this work arises out of the repeated mechanical failure of prototype MEMS-based microscale surgical tools when subject to shock or impact loads, in spite of rigorous design features for minimizing such failures. This behavior can be attributed to the low fracture toughness of silicon and is a general characteristic of brittle materials, particular ceramics. Fittingly, the solution proposed here is inspired by earlier research in the ceramics community.; Structures of a Silicon and Silicon Oxide laminar composite were fabricated with micrometer range laminae widths. This represents a model, scalable material system due to the covalent bonded interface between the laminae materials. Tests performed on these cantilevers to measure their fracture properties, showed higher minimum fracture stresses displayed by composite cantilevers in comparison with identical monolithic silicon structures. Moreover, these minima match well with the "threshold" stress, a lower bound on the fracture stress of this composite predicted from theoretical considerations.; A more complete model for the fracture properties of this material was also developed, removing an important assumption of the existing theory, which limits its application to some material systems. The updated theory models the effect of the laminar structure of the composite as an effective anisotropy in its properties with regard to stress fields around any cracks in the material. The predictions from this model are shown to better replicate results from finite element simulations of laminate geometries than the original model.; Finally, the laminae widths in the composite are reduced to the sub-100nanometer range. A novel process flow for the fabrication of composite structures with these size scales is developed, which has applications for size reductions of microscale devices in general. Fracture tests performed on these "nano-composites" shows their effectiveness in preventing failure due to pre-existing flaws in structures.