Nanostructured metals with maximal grain or twin sizes of less than 100 nm have advanced properties like increased strength.As beneficial as these microstructures can be for the strength of materials, they are not infinitely stable. During mechanical loading these metals tend to coarsen and lose their beneficial structure. Besides electron microscopic analysis of fatigued samples, in situ cycling tests were conducted in order to observe structural degradation during mechanical loading.

The grain microstructure and damage mechanisms at the grain level are the key factors that influence fatigue of metals at small scales. This is addressed in this work by establishing a new micro-mechanical model for prediction of multiaxial high cycle fatigue (HCF) at a length scale of 5-100?m. The HCF model considers elasto-plastic behavior of metals at the grain level and microstructural parameters, specifically the grain size and the grain orientation.

In the last two decades, the reliability of small electronic devices used in automotive or consumer electronics gained researchers attention. Thus, there is the need to understand the fatigue properties and damage mechanisms of thin films. In this thesis a novel high-throughput testing method for thin films on Si substrate is presented. The specialty of this method is to test one sample at different strain amplitudes at the same time and measure an entire lifetime curve with only one experiment.

With the advent of high performance computing, the application areas of the phase-field method, traditionally used to numerically model the phase transformation in metals and alloys, have now spanned into geoscience. A systematic investigation of the two distinct scientific problems in consideration suggest a strong influence of interfacial energy on the natural and induced pattern formation in diffusion-controlled regime.

Understanding the physical processes during fabrication and annealing of ceramic materials is a long sought goal among material scientists. Using strontium titanate as a model system for perovskite ceramics, the present work combines advanced non-destructive 3D characterization techniques and computational modeling of microstructure evolution in order to link grain morphology, interface anisotropy and microstructure evolution to macroscopic physical properties .

The deformation behavior of steels is strongly influenced by their microstructure which is a result of the alloying elements and thermal treatments. In this work, the microstructure and the deformation behavior of a non-alloyed deep drawing DC04 steel was investigated. The microstructure was analyzed during heat treatment by EBSD, then microcompression experiments were performed on selected microstructural units and then bulk steel samples were mechanically tested by tensile experiments.

Custom built setups were developed to investigate micro samples during quasistatic and cyclic testing in tension, compression and bending. Micro molded CuAl10Ni5Fe4-samples showed similar fatigue behavior compared to macroscopic samples due to both the sample size and microstructure being scaled down with the manufacturing process. Results from cyclic three-point bending tests on micro molded 3Y-TZP suggested that a minimum crack extension is necessary to develop cyclically degradable shielding.