The wetting and adhesion characteristics of 20 different surfaces have been studied systematically by both static water contact angle (θ) and dynamic contact angle measurement techniques: sliding angle (α) and advancing (θA) and receding (θR) contact angles. These surfaces cover surfaces of all traits, from smooth and flat to rough and artificially textured. Fourteen of the surfaces are flat, and they range from molded plastic sheets to solution coated polymer films to chemical vapor deposition polymerized polymer films and to self-assembled monolayers on Si wafers. The rest of the surfaces include 4 fluorosilane coated textured Si wafer surfaces and two natural surfaces derived from the front and back side of the rose petal. Static water contact angle data suggest that these surfaces vary from hydrophilic with θ at ∼71° to superhydrophobic with θ exceeding 150°. Plots of θ of these surfaces versus α, (cos θR – cos θA), and the contact angle hysteresis (θA – θR) all yield scattered plots, indicating that there is little correlation between θ and α, (cos θR – cos θA) and (θA – θR). Since the later three parameters have been mentioned to relate to adhesion semiempirically between a liquid droplet and the contacting surface, the present work demonstrates with generality that contact angle indeed does not relate to adhesion. This is consistent with a known but not well recognized fact in the literature. In this work, we study both the wetting and adhesion forces between water and these 20 surfaces on a microelectromechanical balance (tensiometer). When the water drop first touches the surface, the attractive force during this wetting step was measured as the “snap-in” force. The adhesion force between the water drop and the surface was measured as the “pull-off” force when the water drop separates (retracts) from the surface. The snap-in force is shown to decrease monotonously as θA decreases and becomes zero when θA is >150°. The very good correlation is not unexpected due to the similarity between the wetting and the “snap-in” process. The analysis of the pull-off force data is slightly more complicated, and we found that the quality of the water–surface separation depends on the surface “adhesion”. For surfaces that show strong adhesion with water, there is always a small drop of water left behind after the water droplet is pulled off from the surface. Despite this complication, we plot the pull-off force versus α, (cos θR – cos θA) and (θA – θR), and found very little correlation. On the other hand, the pull-off force is found to correlate well to the receding contact angle θR. Specifically, pull-off force decreases monotonically as θR increases, suggesting that θR is a good measure of surface adhesion. Very interestingly, we also observe a qualitative correlation between θR and the quality of the pull-off. The pull-off was found to be clean, free of water residue after pull-off, when θR is >∼90° and vice versa. The implications of this work toward surface contact angle measurements and print surface design...

We present experimental results on the characterization of the mechanical properties of pyrolysed poly-furfuryl alcohol (PFA) nanofibres. Specifically, Young’s modulus and the fracture strain of the nanofibres were measured by performing uni-axial tensile experiments on individual nanofibres in situ in a scanning electron microscope (SEM) using a microfabricated tensile testing device. The nanofibres tested varied in diameter from 150 to 300 nm. Young’s modulus is observed to be within the 1.3–2 GPa range.

The advent of carbon-based micro- and nanoelectromechanical systems has revived the interest in glassy carbon, whose properties are relatively unknown at lower dimensions. In this paper, electrical conductivity of individual glassy carbon nanowires was measured as a function of microstructure (controlled by heat treatment temperature) and ambient temperature. The semiconducting nanowires with average diameter of 150 nm were synthesized from polyfurfuryl alcohol precursors and characterized using transmission electron and Raman microscopy. DC electrical measurements made at 90 K to 450 K show very strong dependence of temperature, following mixed modes of activation energy and hopping-based conduction.

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In this paper we report on the effect of temperature on the electrical conductivity of amorphous and nanoporous (pores size around 0.5 nm) carbon nanowires. Poly(furfuryl alcohol) nanowires with diameter varying from 150 to 250 nm were synthesized by a template-based technique and upon pyrolysis yielded amorphous carbon nanowires with nanosized pores in them. We observed significant (as high as 700%) decrease in electrical resistance when the nanowire surface temperature was increased from room temperature to 160 °C. On the basis of the experimental and microscopy evidence, we infer a thermally activated carrier transport mechanism to be the primary electrical transport mechanism, at elevated temperatures, in these semiconducting, amorphous, and nanoporous carbon nanowires.

We demonstrate the application of fluorescence microscopy to detect nanoscale deformation and damage in polymeric materials. Fluorescent probes were dispersed in a poly-dimethyl siloxane matrix, and were subsequently strained with and without the presence of edge cracks. This technique can reveal cracks that are invisible to white light microscopy (smaller than 250 nm), and is outperformed only by high resolution electron or scanning probe microscopy. The technique may find applications in early stage damage detection in structural health monitoring systems for a wide variety of polymeric materials.

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We present the design, fabrication and experimental validation of a novel device that exploits the amplification of displacement and attenuation of structural stiffness in the post-buckling deformation of slender columns to obtain pico-Newton force and nanometer displacement resolution even under an optical microscope. The extremely small size, purely mechanical sensing scheme and vacuum compatibility of the instrument makes it compatible with existing visualization tools of nanotechnology.The instrument has a wide variety of potential applications ranging from electromechanical characterization of one dimensional solids to single biological cells.