Hardness and mechanical anisotropy of hexagonal SiC single crystal polytypes

The mechanical response of single crystal silicon carbide (SiC) of two hexagonal polytypes (six layer, 6H- and four layer, 4H) was investigated using nanoindentation. Indentations were performed on two specific crystallographic orientations of single crystals i.e., normal to the basal, (0001) and prismatic, (101¯0) planes, in the load range between 25 mN and 500 mN. A significant anisotropy in the hardness is observed with the basal orientations showing a higher hardness compared to prismatic orientations. In both orientations, the 6H-SiC polytype exhibits higher hardness than the 4H-SiC polytype. It is also observed that the hardness decreases with increasing indentation load, suggesting that SiC crystals exhibit indentation size effect. However, unlike hardness, elastic modulus is independent of indentation load and the elastic anisotropy is insignificant. Severe cracking, particularly at higher indentation loads is noticed near the edges of the indentation imprints. The indentation fracture toughness, KICi computed from the imprints shows slightly higher values for 6H-SiC compared to the 4H-SiC. However, for both the polytypes, a slightly higher KICi is observed for basal indentations compared to the prismatic ones. •4H- and 6H-SiC single crystal polytypes exhibit a strong indentation size effect.•Nanohardness of basal (0001) orientations is higher than the prismatic (101¯0) ones.•The indentation fracture toughness of (0001) orientations is higher than the (101¯0).•Hardness and indentation fracture toughness of 6H-SiC is higher than the 4H-SiC single crystals.