SBIR Phase I: Nanothermal Dynamic Mechanical Analysis System For Highly Crosslinked And Filled Polymers

这个小企业创新研究第一阶段项目旨在开发纳米热动态力学分析（Nanothermal DMA）技术。 动态力学分析（DMA）是表征散装特种聚合物的重要工具，但这种类型的测量需要数小时才能提取散装样品的粘弹性响应，而且没有纳米级的空间分辨率。Nanostim DMA系统将大大提高当前纳米级热分析技术的灵敏度，并增加快速测量和绘制纳米级聚合物的温度依赖性弹性和粘弹性响应的能力。该仪器将能够进行力调制频率和温度扫描的时间短至毫秒。这些创新将使空间分辨率和测量速率比现有技术提高许多数量级。这将提供一种新的纳米级表征技术，将允许在纳米级的材料的温度相关的动态机械性能的高灵敏度映射。了解材料在纳米尺度下的结构-性能相关性对于实现所需的材料性能至关重要，从而确保高价值应用中具有足够的强度、柔韧性、韧性和热稳定性。该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力是在聚合物材料（如高度交联和填充系统）至关重要的多个行业中提高可靠性和改善性能。 受影响的一些高价值领域是价值数十亿美元的半导体封装、光子器件、医疗设备和国防/航空航天行业。 仅环氧树脂材料的市场就达150亿美元，遍布众多行业。 在许多这些领域中，每个器件所用的环氧树脂的体积正在迅速缩小，这对可靠地固化环氧树脂提出了挑战，但也在环氧树脂的分析中提出了严重的问题。 由于我们的nanoparticle DMA工具是一种可用于实际器件的非破坏性技术，因此它既可用于基础材料研发，也可用于非常小体积材料的封装器件工艺控制。 它也将有助于1000亿美元医疗器械行业的过程控制和故障排除，其中这些粘合剂是设备可靠性的关键方面。 在所有这些行业中，都在纳米材料方面进行了大量投资，需要新的表征工具来解决在这种长度尺度上严重缺乏热机械数据的问题。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project seeks to develop the technique of Nanothermal Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (Nanothermal DMA). Dynamic Mechanical Analysis (DMA) is an essential tool for characterizing bulk specialty polymers, but this type of measurement requires hours to extract the viscoelastic response of bulk samples, with no nanoscale spatial resolution. The Nanothermal DMA system will dramatically increase the sensitivity of current nanoscale thermal analysis techniques and add the ability to rapidly measure and map the temperature-dependent elasticity and viscoelastic response of polymers on the nanoscale. The instrument will be able to conduct force modulation frequency and temperature sweeps in times as short as milliseconds. These innovations will increase the spatial resolution and measurement rate by many orders of magnitude over currently available techniques. This would provide a novel nanoscale characterization technology that will allow high sensitivity mapping of the temperature dependent dynamic mechanical properties of materials at the nanoscale. Understanding materials' structure-property correlations at the nanoscale is crucial to achieving the desired material properties for ensuring sufficient strength, flexibility, toughness and thermal stability in high-value applications.The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is to allow increased reliability and improved performance across multiple industries where polymeric materials, such as highly crosslinked and filled systems, are critical. A few of the high-value segments to be impacted are the multi-billion dollar industries of semiconductor packaging, photonic devices, medical devices and defense/aerospace. The market for epoxy materials alone is $15 billion, spread across numerous industries. In a number of these fields the volume of epoxy used per device is rapidly shrinking, which creates challenges for reliably curing the epoxy but also poses serious problems in the analysis of the epoxy. Since our nanothermal DMA tool is a non-destructive technique that can be used on actual devices, it can be used both for basic materials R&D and also for packaged device process control on very small volumes of material. It will also be useful for process control and troubleshooting of the portion of the $100 billion medical device industry where these adhesives are a key aspect of device reliability. In all of these industries, large investments are being made in nanoscale materials and new characterization tools are needed to address the critical lack of thermomechanical data at this length scale.