Thin film/substrate systems featuring arbitrary film thickness and misfit strain distributions. Part I: Analysis for obtaining film stress from non-local curvature information

Current methodologies used for the inference of thin film stress through curvature measurements are strictly restricted to stress and curvature states which are assumed to remain uniform over the entire film/substrate system. Recently Huang, Rosakis and co-workers [Huang, Y., Ngo, D., Rosakis, A.J., 2005. Non-uniform, axisymmetric misfit strain: in thin films bonded on plate substrates/substrate systems: the relation between non-uniform film stresses and system curvatures. Acta Mech. Sin. 21, 362–370; Huang, Y., Rosakis A.J., 2005. Extension of Stoney’s Formula to non-uniform temperature distributions in thin film/substrate systems. The case of radial symmetry. J. Mech. Phys. Solids 53, 2483–2500; Ngo, D., Huang, Y., Rosakis, A. J., Feng, X. 2006. Spatially non-uniform, isotropic misfit strain in thin films bonded on plate substrates: the relation between non-uniform film stresses and system curvatures. Thin Solid Films (in press)] established methods for film/substrate system subject to non-uniform misfit strain and temperature changes. The film stresses were found to depend non-locally on system curvatures (i.e., depend on the full-field curvatures). The existing methods, however, all assume uniform film thickness which is often violated in the thin film/substrate system. We extend these methods to arbitrarily non-uniform film thickness for the thin film/substrate system subject to non-uniform misfit strain. Remarkably the stress-curvature relation for uniform film thickness still holds if the film thickness is replaced by its local value at the point where the stress is evaluated. This result has been experimentally validated in Part II of this paper.