Materials wear and wear in micro-electro-mechanical systems

Wear is one of the main reasons of materials failure and mechanical failure. The mechanism of wear is complicated by several factors, such as microstructure change or phase transition of material surface, elastic and plastic mismatch of contact surface, residual stress, working environments and etc. This paper introduces the studies of materials' wear properties in recent years, makes comparisons of several wear mechanisms and gives corresponding wear models. The paper also gives several factors which affect the wear properties of silicon and silicon-based materials in MEMS, such as working environments of MEMS, cohesion force, contact force and surface properties.