The Advantages in Real-time Imaging of Small Scale Mechanical Tests

“Smart” materials are materials capable of performing multiple tasks, sometimes including changing their properties in response to external stimuli. Nanocomposites, as a group, have a large potential to be used as such smart materials: self-monitoring, self-healing, or even “just” possessing unusually high interface-per-volume ratio are quite common characteristics in nanocomposites. These properties are highly useful in applications such as biomed, sensors, energy storage and aerospace. However, proper design of such materials requires accounting for the difference between their behavior in the bulk and at the nanoscale, as different mechanisms are dominant at different length scales. Moreover, maximizing the potential in nanocomposites requires correlating such behaviors to the composites morphology, and – no less important – the morphology changes caused by such behavior, for the nanomaterials to be properly understood and thus designed.

In this talk, the need for imaging mechanical tests in real time will be explained. A few case studies of micro-mechanics under scanning electron microscope (SEM) and nano-mechanics under transmission electron microscope (TEM) will be presented and discussed. The methods presented in these case-studies can also be applied to study the behavior of other nanoscale materials, including soft materials. Future results based on these methods could therefore provide better additional knowledge that can be highly useful for planning and executing nanoscale devices in various fields such as MEMS, biomedicine and even hierarchical structures.