Controlled near surface phase orientations and transformations in stabilised Zirconia
Final Report Abstract
Following the reviewers comments we concentrated on the theoretical aspects of the transformation behaviour of Zirconia in the vicinity of indents and scratches. For this we evaluated first the conditions of Raman spectroscopy measurements and their errors, namely background subtraction and depth of signal generation. A simulation of stress conditions was performed by FEM. Indentation experiments could be linked to such simulations to confirm the basic shape of the stressed region and the phase transformation region. However, the stress sizes of the evaluation from Raman band shift and FEM simulation did not correspond well. Furthermore, the new findings that the monoclinictetragonal transformation is not highest near the indentation surface but within the volume of the stressed region could not be explained unambiguously. And we could not confirm the details of orientation processes from previous studies, which we hoped would allow us to control the surface structure.
