Determination of materials/system properties
Determination of materials/system properties
Application-based friction and wear measurements
Tribology is a very old
area of research, but despite all efforts its still an area that leaves
some fundamental questions unanswered. This lack of a true understanding
is due to the vast complexity of contact geometries and the plethora of
other phenomena taking effect on the forces that arise if two bodies in
contact are moved relative to each other.
To allow for this complexity it is reasonable to characterize macroscopic
friction and wear phenomena with an application based test equipment,
that permits statements about the performance and lifetime of a device/tool.
Contact: Thomas Degen and Thorsten Staedler
Mechanical and tribological characterization on the nano-scale
Loadvariation series of wear test on a polymeric
substrate coated with a thin oxide layer
A multiplicity of modern
applications such as storage devices, TFT's, and MEMS make use of or are
based on thin film technology. The ticknesses of films used in these areas
are usually on the order of several hundred nanometers, but for some applications
filmthicknesses are significantly smaller. Most of the conventional tribological
test equipment is not able to handle such samples.
In these cases a mechanical and tribological characterization is only
possible utilizing a combination of nanoindenter and scanning probe microscopy.
Such a system allows the determination of mechanical (hardness, Young's
modulus) and tribological (friction, wear) properties on a lateral scale
of some tenths of nanometers with a load resolution in the sub-micro Newton
regime. This experimetal setup can be viewed as kind of model-system (single-asperity
contact), that permits to take substrate-, roughness-, and other geometrical
effects into account in order to get access to film properties.
Contact: Thorsten Staedler