Elastic behaviour of titanium dioxide films on polyimide substrates studied by in situ tensile testing in a X-ray diffractometer

The development of new devices has created needs of precision, conformal at the atomic level deposition of high quality thin film materials. In the last years, Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) has received much interest as a potential deposition method for advanced thin film structures. ALD presents several advantages: the film is excellently conformal and reproducible; the film thickness depends only on the number of reaction cycles, which makes the thickness control accurate and simple; the film can be deposited onto all kind of substrates. Because of the process slowness, layer thickness is generally less than 100 nm. This makes more difficult to study all characteristics of the coating. Thin layers deposited onto bulk substrates are generally in tensile or compressive stress state, which may significantly affect physical properties and possibly compromise their lifetime. To determine the residual stress it is mandatory to know the elastic constants that may also depend on the microstructure of the layers and thus the deposition process. In this work, 2D X-ray diffraction (XRD2) in combination with in situ tensile testing has been applied for the first time to measure elastic properties of TiO2 anatase films obtained by ALD. Experimental conditions, the tensile stage being installed in a laboratory micro-diffractometer equipped with a 2D image-plate detector, and the information that can be extracted from 2D diffraction patterns will be discussed. Based on these preliminary results, synchrotron radiation beam time has been allocated to study elastic properties of these thin films. The advantages and disadvantages of the proposed laboratory equipment, with respect to the synchrotron beam lines, are discussed.