NSF funds will be used in arrears to help defray the costs of registration and travel of graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, young faculty and invited speakers. The primary goal of this symposium is the promotion of science by providing a forum for the outstanding exchange of technical knowledge among scientists, engineers, academia and industry leading to solutions in the workplace and in society. Attendees represented industry, academia and government, with a variety of technical interests. The symposium focused on failures in small scale structures (flexible and semiconductor electronic systems, actuators, resonating cantilever, biological systems, fuel cells, MEMS devices, etc) and considered combinations of possible failure mechanisms. Topics included: fracture and deformation of small-scale biological systems, nano-wires/nano-tubes, thin films and film structures, microelectronics, MEMS and micro-pillars.
" symposium was held at the 2010 Annual Meeting of The Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society (TMS) in Seattle, Washington, Feb. 15 – 16, 2010, and was partially supported by NSF funding. This symposium focused on the deformation and failure of micro- and nano-materials, i.e. materials whose internal grain structure is at the nanometer or micron level of size, but whose thinnest external dimension can often be at such small size levels as well - e.g., small wires or thin films. (One micron is equal to 1/1,000 of a millimeter, while one namometer equals 1/1,000,000 of a millimeter). The symposium was comprised of 35 technical presentations submitted by authors from seven different countries, and was well attended. It touched on a myriad of topics including failure, fatigue, and deformation in small scale structures such as nanowires, micro-pillars, and thin films. More specifically, the creation of small-scale structures ranging from thin film electronic systems to micro fuel cells has been prevalent within industry, academia and national laboratory research over about the last fifty years. As fabrication methods have improved, designs have migrated to smaller length scale components and the push toward characterizing reliability of these small-scale structures has highlighted the existence of competing failure mechanisms. This symposium thus focused on failures in small scale structures (e.g., semiconductor electronic systems, actuators, biological systems, fuel cells, etc.) and many of the talks discussed combinations of possible failure mechanisms. Such mechanisms included, but were not limited to: electromigration, diffusion, crack formation and propagation, oxidation, corrosion, fatigue, and delamination. Both experiments and modeling of these events were considered.
