Damage mechanics describes the degradation process that takes place in materials and structures. Traditionally, Coffin–Manson type empirical curves are used to determine the fatigue life. Damage mechanics allows us to determine the fatigue life without the need for empirical curves. The main problem in damage mechanics has always been a lack of universally agreed upon definition of a damage metric. In this paper a damage metric based on the second law of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics is presented. The proposed thermodynamic framework treats a solid body as a thermodynamic system and requires that the entropy production be nonnegative. Verification of the damage model has been performed by extensive comparisons with laboratory test data of low cycle fatigue of Pb40/Sn60 solder alloy.

ABSTRACT:The entropy production is a non-negative quantity based on irreversible thermodynamics and thus serves as a basis for the systematic description of the irreversible processes occurring in a solid. In this paper, a thermodynamic framework has been presented for damage mechanics of solid materials, where entropy production is used as the sole measure of damage evolution in the system. As a result, there is no need for physically meaningless empirical parameters to define a phenomenological damage potential surface or a Weibull function to trace damage evolution in solid continuum. In order to validate the model, predictions are compared with experimental results, which indicates that entropy production can be used as a damage evolution metric. The theory is founded on the basic premise that a solid continuum obeys the first and the second laws of thermodynamics.

Electromigration of solder joint under high dc current density is known as a reliability concern for the future high-density flip chip packaging and power packaging. Biased mass diffusion within solder joint from cathode to anode under high dc current density is observed in these experiments. In this letter, the experiments on flip chip solder joints under dc current stressing are conducted and thermomigration due to the thermal gradient in the solder joint caused by joule heating is reported. A three-dimensional coupled electric thermal finite-element (FE) simulation of a realistic flip chip module shows the existence of thermal gradient in the solder joint which is high enough to trigger thermomigration.

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