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Fatigue testing facility
The primary cause of failure in micro/nano devices is fatigue due to repeated cycles of dynamic loading. It is therefore critical (especially in the context of NEMS and MEMS industry) to be able to characterize these properties of nanosystems and use this information to improve their performance and longevity. The proposed system should be able to measure dynamic mechanical properties of nanosystems like viscoelastic complex moduli, intrinsic damping, creep and stress relaxation, temperature controlled analysis including accelerated testing. Moreover, it should have the capability of detecting crack initiation, monitoring crack growth, and imaging damage evolution since these phenomena are central to fatigue studies. In addition to specialized testing, it should be able to perform standard mechanical tests including measurements of elastic moduli, hardness, friction and wear, fracture toughness, etc. To achieve the proposed objective, in addition to equipments already available on campus (like AFM), a dedicated fatigue testing system is proposed. This instrument will complement the AFM available on campus through highly specialized functionality for performing dynamic mechanical tests on micro/nano devices. These instruments would also boost theoretical modeling and analysis activity by facilitating experimental validation of the same.
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