For the design of highly stressable microcomponents, their mechanical behavior has to be analyzed in order to guarantee secure working. The microcomponents considered here are made of Stabilor 1 G, which is an alloy mainly consisting of gold and having a cubic crystal symmetry. Besides the constituents silver, copper, and palladium, zinc is added for enhancing the castability. The investigated microtensile specimens with a gauge length of 0.78 mm and a crosssectional area of 0:26 Â 0:13 mm 2 have been produced by vacuum pressure diecasting with a muffle temperature of T m ¼ 700 C at the Institute for Materials Research III of the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and experimentally tested at the Institut fü r Werkstoffkunde I, Universität Karlsruhe (TH) [1,2] . Due to the average grain size of these specimens, which is identified to be 35.1 mm, the tensile specimen consists of approximately 600 grains. Although, the manufacturing process does not provide any indication for the presence of preferential grain orientations, the mechanical behavior of the specimens depends strongly on the particular orientation distribution, since only a comparatively small number of grains forms the whole specimen. In this study, the influence of the number of grains on the mean value and the scattering of the elastic properties of microspecimens is analyzed by utilizing the finite element method.
Cubic Single CrystalsPolycrystalline Stabilor 1 G consists of grains with a cubic crystal symmetry. Therefore, besides the grain orientation, three independent elastic constants describe the linear elastic material behavior of the single crystalline grains. The stiffness tensor C and the compliance tensor S, specifying Hooke's law by s ¼ C½e and e ¼ S½s, can be written in projector representation [3]