Mechanical properties of thin films studied by bulge testing

The bulge test is a method of choice for investigating the mechanical behavior of freestanding films as thin as a few hundreds of nanometers. The work presented in this book extends the scope of this technique to the study of the fracture, time-dependent and fatigue properties of different kinds of membranes, with applications to gold and silicon nitride samples. These results were achieved during a PhD thesis performed at the Institute for General Materials Properties of the Materials Science Department at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg.