ABSTRACT
We present a procedure dedicated to the calibration of a scanning thermal microscopy probe operated in an active mode and a modulated regime especially for the measurement of solid material thermal conductivities. The probe used is a microthermocouple wire mounted on a quartz tuning fork. Measurements on reference samples are performed successively in vacuum and ambient air conditions revealing a clear difference in the dependence of the thermal interaction between the probe and the sample on the sample properties. Analytical modeling based on the resolution of the heat equation in the wire probe and a description of the thermal interaction using a network of thermal conductances are used to fit experimental data and analyze this difference. We have experimentally verified that the effective thermal contact radius of the probe tip depends on the sample thermal conductivity in ambient conditions, whereas it remains constant in vacuum. We have defined the measurement range of the technique based on the decrease in the probe sensitivity at high thermal conductivities. Considering the experimental noise of our electrical device, it is shown that the maximum measurable value of thermal conductivity is near 23 W m-1 K-1 in vacuum and 37 W m-1 K-1 in ambient air conditions. Moreover, the lowest uncertainties are obtained for thermal conductivities below 5 W m-1 K-1 typically.
ABSTRACT
A scanning thermal microscope working in passive mode using a micronic thermocouple probe is presented as a quantitative technique. We show that actual surface temperature distributions of microsystems are measurable under conditions for which most of usual techniques cannot operate. The quantitative aspect relies on the necessity of an appropriate calibration procedure which takes into account of the probe-to-sample thermal interaction prior to any measurement. Besides this consideration that should be treated for any thermal contact probing system, the main advantages of our thermal microscope deal with the temperature available range, the insensitivity to the surface optical parameters, the possibility to image DC, and AC temperature components up to 1 kHz typically and a resolution limit related to near-field behavior.
ABSTRACT
In this article we present the study of the sensitivity optimization of our system of micromechanical characterization called the scanning microdeformation microscope. The flexural contact modes of vibration of the cantilever have been modeled. We discuss the matching between the cantilever stiffness and the contact stiffness which depends on the sample material. In order to obtain the best sensitivity, the stiffnesses must be the closest one to each other. Because the length of the cantilever directly affects its stiffness, the cantilever geometry can be optimized for different materials. We have validated this study with measurements on a soft material the polydimethylsiloxane with a cantilever optimized for materials of Young's moduli of some megapascals. Experimental results obtained with two different samples have shown the high sensitivity of the method for the measurement of low Young's moduli and have been compared with nanoindentation and dynamic mechanical analysis results.
ABSTRACT
We propose a new setup to measure an electrical field in one direction. This setup is made of a piezoelectric sintered lead zinconate titanate film and an optical interferometric probe. We used this setup to investigate how the shape of the extremity of a coaxial cable influences the longitudinal electrical near-field generated by it. For this application, we designed our setup to have a spatial resolution of 100 microm in the direction of the electrical field. Simulations and experiments are presented.
ABSTRACT
Ultrasonic measurement of distance is a well-known low cost method but only a few vibrometers have been developed because sensitivity, spatial resolution, and bandwidth are not high or wide enough for standard laboratory applications. Nevertheless, compared to optical vibrometers, two interesting properties should be considered: very low frequency noise (0.1 Hz to 1 kHz) is reduced and the long wavelength enables rough surfaces to be investigated. Moreover, the ultrasonic probe is a differential sensor, without being a mechanical load for the vibrating structure as usual accelerometers based on contacting transducers are. The main specificity of the presented probe is its ultralow noise electronics including a 3/2 order phase locked loop which extracts the phase modulation related to the amplitude of the detected vibration. This article presents the main useful physical aspects and details of the actual probe. The given application is the measurement of the vibration of an isolated optical bench excited at very low frequency with an electromagnetic transducer.
Subject(s)
Amplifiers, Electronic , Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted/instrumentation , Transducers , Ultrasonography/instrumentation , Vibration , Computer-Aided Design , Equipment Design , Equipment Failure Analysis , Reproducibility of Results , Sensitivity and SpecificityABSTRACT
The Scanning Microdeformation Microscope, as many other scanning probe microscopes developed in the last years, is a kind of ac force microscope using the near-field acoustic interaction. The heart of the system is an electromechanical oscillator made of a silicon cantilever, a diamond or sapphire tip, associated with a bimorph piezoelectric transducer and a specific amplifier. The specificity of the system is the way of detection of the oscillation frequency performed electrically through the admittance of the piezoelectric transducer. In this paper, we describe the technique of detection involved in the microscope. A modelling of the complete behavior of the electromechanical oscillator performed with the finite element method (FEM) (of simulation) is presented. A comparison between experimental and theoretical behavior shows a very good agreement.
