Fatigue Life Prediction of the Zirconia Fixture Based on Boundary Element Method.

Zirconia grinding fixtures have been widely used in semiconductor industry to improve the quality and precision of the products. For maximizing the service life and minimizing the risks of accidental damage, it is critical to have a better understanding of the fatigue life of zirconia grinding fixtures. To this end, a boundary element method is developed in this paper to investigate their crack growth and fatigue life. To validate the proposed method, the stress intensity factor of a typical plate structure with initial cracks is considered. On this basis, Paris Law is employed in the boundary element model to further study the crack growth and stress distributions in the zirconia fixture under cyclic loads. Numerical results show that stress concentration occurs at the pillar of the fixture, and crack growth is perpendicular to the loading direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]