High-temperature tensile testing machine for investigation of brittle-ductile transition behavior of single crystal silicon microstructure

This paper reports development of a high-temperature tensile testing machine and testing of single crystal silicon (SCS) for investigation of the size effect on brittle-ductile transition temperature (BDTT). Two different-width 〈110〉 SCS specimens (120 µm long, 5 µm thick and 4 or 9 µm wide) were tested in a vacuum at the temperature range from room temperature to 600 °C. The specimens tested at 500 °C and above exhibit slip, which indicated that the micrometer-sized silicon structures have lower BDTT compared to millimeter-sized ones. By investigating the temperature ranges of the slip occurrences among the differently-sized specimens including other researchers reports, we found that the length along slip direction, i.e., thickness, might dominate the BDTT.