Inversion of surface damage and residual stress in ground silicon wafers by laser surface acoustic wave technology

The paper presents a study of surface acoustic waves propagation in a damage layer with finite thickness and residual stress on an orthotropic semi-infinite medium to reveal the application of laser ultrasound in the surface inspection of ground silicon wafers. Biot's theory of small deformations influenced by initial stress forms the basis for this study. Considering the case that the displacement and boundary forces are continuous at the interface and the forces vanish on the free surface, the required dispersion relation is obtained. We consider a sample of (100) silicon wafer by grinding with fine abrasive grains, which has a machined face with a micrometer-level thickness of surface damage and residual stress. In order to discuss the impact of propagation directions, degree of surface damage, residual compressive stress on the velocity characteristics of surface waves, the numerical computation of the dispersion equations is performed. It has been found that surface damage has a significant effect on the dispersion curve, while the residual compressive stress can only cause a small decrease Δc in the surface wave velocity. The velocity decrease Δc becomes obvious at high frequencies. For a fixed residual compressive stress and frequency, Δc hardly changes with the degree of surface damage and propagation directions. Based on the above characteristics, we study the inverse problem on detecting both surface damage and residual stress simultaneously by SAW velocities and give a corresponding iterative algorithm. This study may provide theoretical guidance for non-destructive testing of residual stress.