Test Bed for Mechanical Characterization of Nanowires

Abstract

Nanowires are one-dimensional solids that are deemed to be the building-block materials for next-generation sensors and actuators. Owing to their unique length scale, they exhibit superior mechanical properties and other length-scale-dependent phenomena. Most of these are challenging to explore, owing to the difficulties in specimen preparation, manipulation, and the requirement of high-resolution force and displacement sensing. To address these issues, a micromechanical device for uniaxial mechanical testing of single nanowires and nanotubes is used here. The device has 10 nN force and 1 nm displacement resolution and its small size (2 · 1 mm) allows for in situ experimentation inside analytical chambers, such as the electron microscopes. A microscale pick-and-place technique is presented as a generic specimen preparation and manipulation method for testing single nanowires. Preliminary results on zinc oxide nanowires show the Young's modulus and fracture strain to be about 76 GPa and 8 per cent respectively.

Review: Semiconductor Piezoresistance for Microsystems

“…Nanoindentation is a popular method to determine the hardness and elastic modulus of nanowires, such as gallium nitride (GaN) and zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires, tantalum oxide (Ta 2 O 5 ) nanowires, single-crystal and polycrystalline copper nanowires, and gold nanowires [357]–[362]. Zhu and Espinosa, Desai et al , and Lu et al have also developed MEMS experimental test beds for electromechanical testing of nanowires [359], [362], [363]. …”

Mechanical testing of pyrolysed poly-furfuryl alcohol nanofibres

“…We present a brief literature review on the techniques used in the mechanical characterization of one-dimensional nanosolids with a specific focus on polymeric nanofibre testing. Although the material properties of metallic nanowires [9,10] and semiconducting nanowires [11,12] have been extensively researched, less work has been done in the study of the mechanical properties of single polymer nanofibres. This is because polymers have at least three orders of magnitude lower stiffness as compared to common engineering or micro-electronic materials [13], thereby requiring very high force resolution in the experimental set-up.…”

Electro-mechanical coupling in ZnO nanowires

“…The details of the design, working and fabrication of the MEMS device are reported in another paper 38 ; the device can apply uniaxial load to nanoscale specimens and measure the force and displacement on the specimen with nano-Newton and nanometer resolution respectively. A microscale version of pick-and-place technique was used to manipulate the ZnO nanowires to the MEMS experimental test-bed (the details are reported in another paper 39 ). Instead of directly picking up the nanowire, we manipulated a thin oxide grid with the nanowire on it.…”

“…After placing the nanowire at the site of experimentation, the MEMS device was placed on a special SEM stage. This stage is able to apply displacement loading to the device using a piezoactuator, which in turn applies uniaxial loading on the specimen (the details of the SEM stage are reported in another paper 39 ). The MEMS device was loaded inside a SEM chamber to apply uniaxial tensile load on the nanowire specimen.…”