Recent efforts in modelling combined rate, size and thermal effects on single crystal strength

The understanding of structural responses at different sizes under various temperatures and loading rates is essential to evaluating the integrity and safety of MEMS/NEMS devices in an extreme environment. Based on the experimental and computational capabilities available, an effort has been made recently to formulate a hyper-surface in spatial, temporal and thermal domains to model combined rate, size and thermal effects on single crystal strength. It appears from the preliminary results that the proposed procedure might provide an effective means to bridge different spatial and temporal scales in a unified multiscale modelling framework at different temperatures. To further improve the proposed procedure, a mathematical analysis on the hyper-surface formulation, and the progress in investigating the effects of loading path and crystal orientation on the hyper-surface are presented, and future research tasks are discussed in this paper. © 2006 Advanced Study Center Co. Ltd.