Abstract
In the last four decades, the car body thickness has reduced significantly from almost 1.5 mm to
below 0.5 mm. This was mainly due to the demand for weight reduction for saving more fuel cost.
Besides being thinner, maintaining the high strength of car body was possible by using a newly
developed high-strength steel thin plate. However, mechanical properties of bulk materials which
usually tested using a standard big size sample are not necessarily representing the actual properties
of the material when dealing with very thin and small size components. This drives the research on
the mechanical properties of the micro-sized specimen for the production of tiny metal-based
components. In this study, tensile and fracture behaviors of the micro-sized specimen were
investigated. The materials used were 100 and 300 micron stainless steel S304 thin plates, the tests
were carried out on specimens of ASTM A313M spring steel materials. The results showed that
100 micron thin plate exhibited higher tensile strength with no clear evidence of yielding as
compared to 300 micron plates. The fracture morphology images observed by Scanning Electron
Microscopy (SEM) revealed that both specimens fractured in ductile mode. Formation of dimples
on the fracture surface could be recognized easily in 300 micron sample at higher magnification as
compared to 100 micron sample
