Publications Details

Small Strain Plasticity Behavior of 304L Stainless Steel in Glass-to-Metal Seal Applications

Antoun, Bonnie R.; Chambers, Robert S.; Emery, John M.; Tandon, Rajan T.

Cracks in glass-to-metal seals can be a threat to the hermeticity of isolated electronic components. Design and manufacturing of the materials and processes can be tailored to minimize the residual stresses responsible for cracking. However, this requires high fidelity material modeling accounting for the plastic strains in the metals, mismatched thermal shrinkage and property changes experienced as the glass solidifies during cooling of the assembly in manufacturing. Small plastic strains of just a few percent are typical during processing of glass-to-metal seals and yet can generate substantial tensile stresses in the glass during elastic unloading in thermal cycling. Therefore, experimental methods were developed to obtain very accurate measurements of strain near and just beyond the proportional limit. Small strain tensile characterization experiments were conducted with varying levels and rates of strain ratcheting over the temperatures range of -50 to 550 °C, with particular attention near the glass transition temperature of 500 °C. Additional experiments were designed to quantify the effects of stress relaxation and reloading. The experimental techniques developed and resulting data will be presented. Details of constitutive modeling efforts and glass material experiments and modeling can be found in Chambers et al. (Characterization & modeling of materials in glass-to-metal seals: Part I. SAND14-0192. Sandia National Laboratories, January 2014).