Damage processes coupled with phase separation in elastically stressed alloys

In micro-electronic materials such as solder alloys, phase-separation and coarsening as well as damage phenomena occur at the same time and influences each other. In this note, a unifying model which couples multi-component Cahn-Hilliard systems with elasticity and uni-directional damage processes is presented. We outline the equations and their initial-boundary conditions in a classical setting and cite some existence results for weak solutions recently proved in [8, 9]. The damage is assumed to be incomplete, i.e. the maximal damaged material parts still feature elastic properties. (© 2012 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)