Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 February 2011
The vibrational technique for stress measurement in films has been used to study silver foils, silver-based conductor pastes, and aluminum foil. During cooling, a tensile stress develops in the films due to thermal expansion mismatch with the substrate. Because the stress is limited by the yield stress, these experiments furnish data for the yield stress of the materials over a wide range of temperature at fixed state. Experiments with silver specimens pre-annealed to different grain sizes show that the yield stress follows the Hall-Petch relationship. The full vibrational analysis is used to extract the stiffness of the foils.