AFM-based Local Thermal Analysis as a High-Resolution Analytical Method for Organic Materials

摘要

Polymer materials are used in many industries because of the tunability of their properties. Large variations in the materials' properties are often achieved by blending different polymers together in a homogeneous mixture. However, blends of polymers tend to phase separate causing failure of the devices, in which such materials were used. Thermo-mechanical analysis was successfully used to determine usable temperature range for these materials. In order to understand mechanisms involved in phase separation of bends local analysis of thermomechanical properties is desirable. Currently, several scanning probe microscopy based techniques for local thermal analysis exist (Transition Temperature Microscopy (TTM) [1], Scanning Thermal Expansion Microscopy (SThEM) [2], Thermally Assisted Atomic Force Acoustic Microscopy (TA-AFAM) [3], ZTherm [4] and Band Excitation-NanoTA (BE-NanoTA) [5]). All these techniques are based on characterization of the contact properties. Only two techniques (ZTherm and BE-NanoTA) are capable of providing complete information about contact properties, such as contact stiffness, contact damping coefficient etc.