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

这个小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目致力于开发纳米热动态机械分析(Nano热DMA)技术。动态力学分析(DMA)是表征块状特种聚合物的重要工具，但这种测量需要数小时才能提取块状样品的粘弹性响应，而且没有纳米级的空间分辨率。纳米热DMA系统将极大地提高当前纳米级热分析技术的灵敏度，并增加在纳米级上快速测量和绘制聚合物随温度变化的弹性和粘弹性响应的能力。该仪器将能够在短至毫秒的时间内进行力调制频率和温度扫描。这些创新将使空间分辨率和测量速度比目前可用的技术提高许多数量级。这将提供一种新的纳米级表征技术，允许在纳米级高灵敏度地绘制材料随温度变化的动态力学性能图。在纳米尺度上了解材料的结构-性能相关性对于实现所需的材料性能至关重要，以确保高价值应用中有足够的强度、灵活性、韧性和热稳定性。该项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力是允许在多个行业提高可靠性和改善性能，在这些行业中，聚合物材料，如高度交联和填充系统，是至关重要的。一些受影响的高价值细分市场是价值数十亿美元的半导体封装、光子设备、医疗设备和国防/航空航天行业。仅环氧材料的市场规模就达150亿美元，遍及众多行业。在许多这样的领域中，每个设备使用的环氧量正在迅速缩小，这给可靠地固化环氧树脂带来了挑战，但也给环氧树脂的分析带来了严重的问题。由于我们的纳米热DMA工具是一种可在实际器件上使用的非破坏性技术，因此它既可用于基础材料研发，也可用于极少量材料的封装器件工艺控制。它还将有助于对价值1000亿美元的医疗器械行业进行过程控制和故障排除，这些粘合剂是设备可靠性的关键方面。在所有这些行业中，正在对纳米材料进行大量投资，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.