Finite Element Analysis of the Indentation-Induced
Delamination of Bi-Layer Structures
Ming Liu and Fuqian Yang∗
Materials Program, Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA

Journal of
Computational and Theoretical Nanoscience
Vol. 9, 851–858, 2012

Contact deformation can cause local damage of mechanical structures and lead to structural failure
of mechanical devices. In this work, we use the finite element method to analyze the indentation-
induced delamination of a film-substrate structure and the critical tensile stress as the criterion to
determine local delamination on the interface between the film and the substrate. The simulation
results show that both the size of the delamination zone and the maximum separation increase
with increasing the indentation depth and with decreasing the film thickness. The delamination also
depends on the interfacial friction for the sliding on the interface. The largest delamination occurs at
the friction coefficient of 0.5 for the film-substrate structure used in this work. For friction coefficient
larger than 0.5, the size of the delamination zone decreases with increasing the friction coefficient.
Keywords: Indentation, Delamination, Film, Interface, Finite Element Analysis.