Recent Progress in the 3D Experimentation and Simulation of Nanoindents

摘要

This work studies the rotations of a (111) Cu single crystal due to the application of a conical nanoindent. With the aid of a joint high-resolution field emission SEM-EBSD set-up coupled with serial sectioning in a focused ion beam (FIB) system in the form of a cross-beam 3D crystal orientation microscope (3D EBSD) a 3D rotation map underneath the indent could be extracted. When analyzing the rotation directions in the cross section planes (11-2) perpendicular to the (111) surface plane below the indenter tip we observe multiple transition regimes with steep orientation gradients and changes in rotation direction. A phenomenological and a physically-based 3D elastic-viscoplastic crystal plasticity model are implemented in two finite element simulations adopting the geometry and boundary conditions of the experiment. While the phenomenological model predicts the general rotation trend it fails to describe the fine details of the rotation patterning with the frequent changes in sign observed in the experiment. The physically-based model, which is a dislocation density based constitutive model, succeeded to precisely predict the crystal rotation map compared with the experiment. Both simulations over-emphasize the magnitude of the rotation field near the indenter relative to that measured directly below the indenter tip. However, out of the two models the physically-based model reveals better crystal rotation angles