Elastic property estimation in polycrystalline films with crystallographic texture and grain shape

Although methods of measuring the elastic properties of thin films have made great advances with the use of bulge testing of membranes, deflection of micromachined beams, and nanoindentation, most results are still being compared to either isotropic or single crystal elastic constants, neither of which are, in general, appropriate for textured polycrystalline films. This paper uses recent results of a self-consistent model (after Kroner and Kneer) which calculates the elastic anisotropy arising from crystallographic texture and which has been extended to predict the anisotropy resulting from grain shape. These results are compared to the various Voigt, Reuss, and Hill approximations that are appropriate for different crystallographic textures. The accuracies of the different models are evaluated in terms of their ability to predict the biaxial modulus and indentation compliance that are most commonly measured in thin films.