LAUSR

Abstract The main aim of the present work is to estimate the effective elastic stiffnesses of a two-phase diamond/β-SiC composite thin film that is fabricated by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). The microstructure-property relation via elastic homogenization is obtained starting from a typical dataset of two micrographs displaying the phase distributions in perpendicular planes, a cross-section and the surface of the thin film. A statistically representative volume element (RVE) is reconstructed by a software based on algorithms for solid texture synthesis and by means of identified material symmetries in 2D of the specimen. The elastic homogenization results indicate that the two-phase diamond/β-SiC composite is in almost perfect agreement with transverse isotropy, for which the set of six independent material parameters is identified. The results are not only new and relevant for the field of diamond-based microcomposites but provide an exemplary guide for analyzing the microstructure-property relation of CVD-type thin film composites by effective means of computational materials science.