Methods to determine plastic response of films

Experimental techniques most commonly used to probe the plastic properties of thin film materials involve direct tensile loading of either a freestanding film or a film deposited onto a deformable substrate material, microbeam bending of films on substrates, substrate curvature measurement or instrumented depth-sensing nanoindentation. Sahent features of these methods, as well as specific examples of the adaptation of these methods for the study of mechanical properties in thin films, are briefly addressed in the following subsections. 

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Continuum descriptions of the evolution of stress, substrate curvature and plastic deformation also provide a useful and broad framework with which experimental observations of strain relaxation in thin films on substrates can be assessed. As shown in later sections of this chapter, such analyses provide some tools with which the plastic deformation response can be experimentally determined by recourse to methods such as substrate curvature measurement, x-ray diffraction or indentation. 

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