Thermally Activated Deformation Behavior of ufg-Au: Environmental Issues During Long-Term and High-Temperature Nanoindentation Testing

For testing time-dependent material properties by nanoindentation, in particular for long-term creep or relaxation experiments, thermal drift influences on the displacement signal are of prime concern. To address this at room and elevated temperatures, we tested fused quartz at various contact depths at room temperature and ultra-fine grained (ufg) Au at various temperatures. We found that the raw data for fused quartz are strongly affected by thermal drift, but corrected by use of dynamic stiffness measurements all the datasets collapse. The situation for the ufg Au shows again that the data are only useful with drift correction, but with this applied it turns out that there is a significant change of elastic and plastic properties when exceeding 200°C, which is also reflected by an increasing strain rate sensitivity.