RESEARCH ARTICLE Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of Crystallographic Orientation Dependence of Nanoscratching of Single Crystalline

In the present work, we perform experiments and molecular dynamics simulations to eluci-date the underlying deformation mechanisms of single crystalline copper under the load-controlled multi-passes nanoscratching using a triangular pyramidal probe. The correlation of microscopic deformation behavior of the material with macroscopically-observed machin-ing results is revealed. Moreover, the influence of crystallographic orientation on the nano-scratching of single crystalline copper is examined. Our simulation results indicate that the plastic deformation of single crystalline Cu under the nanoscratching is exclusively gov-erned by dislocation mechanisms. However, there is no glissile dislocation structure formed due to the probe oscillation under the load-controlled mode. Both experiments and MD sim-ulations demonstrate that the machined surface morphologies in terms of groove depth and surface pile-up exhibit strong crystallographic orientation dependence, because of different geometries of activated slip planes cutting with free surfaces and strain hardening abilities associated with different crystallographic orientations