Deformation and failure of a film/substrate system subjected to spherical indentation: Part II. Prediction of failure modes in a thin TiN film deposited on a compliant elastic substrate

We have demonstrated previously, using nanoindentation, that the film thickness and substrate plasticity, the important two external variables in the film layer, control the failure of the film in a mutually exclusive way. In this work, we used a non-iterative Hankel transform method to analyze the stresses in an elastic film bound to an elastic substrate by a no-slip boundary condition and subjected to a Hertzian traction. We vary the substrate compliance by two orders of magnitude to generate interfacial mismatch stresses, which mimic the corresponding changes found in a real-life elastic film on an elastic-plastic substrate when the hardness of the substrate is changed. The analysis is found to reproduce faithfully the experimental trends, which showed that normal load and interfacial stresses generated by strain mismatch drive different modes of fracture depending on the film thickness in a mutually exclusive way. This validation paves the way for this theoretical technique to be used to design multilayered film structures. © 2006 Materials Research Society.