A study of the effect of experimental test parameters on data scatter in microbond testing

This paper evaluates the effect of two experimental parameters, namely microvise blade geometry and blade separation, on the scatter in measured interfacial strength in microbond experiments, with the help of two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) finite element models. The 3D model better captures the 'exact' loading nature of the problem as compared to the 2D model but it is computationally intensive. Stress distributions obtained by finite element analysis are compared with those from the shear-lag model often used to analyze microbond experiments. This comparison determines the effectiveness of using shear-lag analysis in microbond experiments and for explaining the reasons for commonly observed data scatter.