ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I express my gratitude towards my supervising professor Dr. Panos Shiakolas for constantly motivating and encouraging me, and also for his invaluable advice, guidance and support throughout the course of my research work. I wish to thank Dr. Seiichi Nomura and Dr. Woo Ho Lee for their interest in my research and for taking time to serve in my thesis defense committee. I reserve my special thanks to Mr. Tom Leeds, Mr. Mike Baker and Mr. Sam Williams of the Mechanical Engineering machine shop for their invaluable advice during this research especially during the fabrication of the tensile testing fixture. I am especially grateful to also thank Dr. Sunil Belligundu for his assistance with initial embossing experiments on the HEMM setup. I want to thank Mr. Nitin Uppal for helping me with the Regression Analysis. I would also thank Mr. Puneet Saggar and Mr. Viswaas Bedekar for their help with bond strength measurement experiments. Finally, I also appreciate th