Stress in hard metal films

In the absence of thermal stress, tensile stress in hard metal films is caused by grain boundary shrinkage and compressive stress is caused by ion peening. It is shown that the two contributions are additive. Moreover tensile stress generated at the grain boundaries does not relax by ion bombardment. In polycrystalline hard metal films the grain...

Tensile stress in hard metal films

Thin films on substrates are usually in a stressed state. An important, but trivial, contribution to that stress stems from the difference in thermal expansion coefficient of substrate and film. Much more interesting are the intrinsic stresses, resulting from the growth and/or microstructure of the film. Intrinsic compressive stress was...