Characterization of nanoscale property variations in polymer composite systems: 1. Experimental results

Hybrid membrane materials comprising organic polymers with rigid dispersed phases

“…This model provides a useful way to estimate an effective thickness of the interphase, which is very difficult to probe using other methods. For example, rigidification near glass fibers has been measured using an atomic force microscope (Hodzic et al, 2000;VanLandingham et al, 1998), but the thickness was difficult to accurately quantify and this technique will be difficult to implement with particulate filled composites.…”

Effects of thermal histories on interfacial properties of carbon fiber/polyamide 6 composites: Thickness, modulus, adhesion and shear strength

“…Local mechanical interfacial characteristics including hardness, stiffness, and modulus were traditionally assessed by nanomechanical techniques based on tip-sample interaction, such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) [15,16], nanoindentation, nanoscratch [17,18], and dynamic modulus mapping [19,20]. Gu et al [21] presented a dynamic mechanical imaging (DMI) method to extract the whole interface dimension and achieve quantitative analysis on thickness and modulus.…”

Deformation of the cell nucleus under indentation: Mechanics and mechanisms

“…The results demonstrated that the overall response of an isolated nucleus in micropipette aspiration experiment is highly sensitive to the stiffness of the nuclear envelope, while the mechanical contribution of the nucleoplasm over the time course of these experiments is insignificant. Here, we used this computational model to examine the deformation of an isolated nucleus in indentation experiments using atomic force microscopy (AFM), which have been used extensively for imaging and studying the mechanical behavior and rheology of polymers, [13][14][15][16] thin films, [17][18][19][20] and biological materials. [21][22][23][24] It is noteworthy that the current data on the apparent stiffness of cell nuclei are rather divergent, with values ranging from 18 Pa to nearly 10 kPa 12,[25][26][27] due to factors such as cell type, measurement techniques and conditions, length scale of interest, and also interpretation methods.…”