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Application Notes
Strain-rate sensitivity (SRS) is an important material property, because it quantifies the tendency of the material to creep. Materials which do not creep have a near-zero strain-rate sensitivity. For materials with high strain-rate sensitivity, small stresses can cause plastic deformation, if the strain rate is sufficiently small. In this note, we present a new technique for measuring strain-rate sensitivity by instrumented indentation. This new technique is insensitive to thermal drift and can be used for thin films and other small volumes. We demonstrate the technique by using it to measure the strain-rate sensitivity of thin copper and nickel films deposited on silicon, and we compare our results to those that have been published for comparable materials. Maier et al. measured the strain-rate sensitivity of ultra-fine-grained nickel by instrumented indentation to be 0.019, and they compared this value to the results of uniaxial testing on the same material which gave a value of 0.016. Ye et al. consolidated strainrate sensitivity measurements that have been published for copper and presented them as a function of grain size. For grain sizes on the order of 100 nm–1500 nm, reported values for strain-rate sensitivity of copper varied between 0.005 and 0.02. These ranges (0.016–0.019 for nickel; 0.005–0.02 for copper) set our expectations for the present work.
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