Study of the bending modulus of individual silicon nitride nanobelts via atomic force microscopy

Extracting nanowire mechanical properties from three-point bendig test

“…We are fully aware that the Ag nanowires from different groups are fabricated/processed differently, which can significantly change the nanowire material properties. However, Chen et al [8,9] pointed out that the single point measurements as those done in references [2,3,4,5,6,7,10] may have the largest drawback of assuming wrong boundary conditions. The same contradicting experimental observations on other type of nanowire Young's modulus measurements are also noticed by Park and Klein [16].…”

“…Here k is the effective spring stiffness of the beam and AFM measures the force-displacement ( mp F z ) curves [5,7,8,9,10,11]. F is the concentrated load exerted at the center of the beam; mp z is the beam midpoint displacement, which is also the maximum one for a clamped-clamped (C-C) beam and a hinged-hinged (H-H) beam with the load at its center.…”

“…Due to its high spatial resolution and the accuracy/sensitivity of direct force measurement, bending test with AFM is commonly used for those mechanical characterizations. The 1D micro/nanomaterials in test are first suspended over either a pore of porous material [2,3,4,6], or a strip [5], or an etched hole [7], or a trench [8,9,10,11]. The AFM tip then exerts a concentrated force on some place of the suspended section to form a typical three-point bending test [7].…”

“…The so-called one dimensional (1D) nanostructures [1], such as micro/nanotube [2,3,4], nanobelt [5] and nanowire [6,7,8,9,10,11] are important types of materials used in gas sensor, high-frequency resonator, nanoscale light-emitting diodes, high resolution tip for atomic force microscope (AFM), scanning tunneling microscopes (STM) and photovoltaics etc. The mechanical properties of these 1D mi-cro/nanomaterials are of interest for both technical and theoretical reasons.…”

Mechanical properties of TiSi2 nanowires

“…The synthesis, field emission property and electric transport properties of TiSi 2 nanowires have been studied in our research group [9,10]. Although a number of pioneering works have been focused on predicting the mechanical properties of nanostructures [11][12][13][14][15], to the best of our knowledge, reports on the mechanical properties of nanostructured TiSi 2 materials are rarely found. In this work, the mechanical properties of single C54 TiSi 2 nanowires are systematically measured.…”