High-throughput mechanical characterization of free-standing polymer films

In this article we review the design, construction, and operation of an instrument for high-throughput mechanical characterization (HTMECH) of polymer films. In particular, the HTMECH is applied here to free-standing polymer libraries with gradients in properties such as temperature and composition. Here, the goal is discovery of mechanical property relationships with polymer formulation and processing. However, HTMECH can also measure strain-rate libraries for uniform samples from near-static to meters-per-second (impact velocities). HTMECH measures force and deformation of film regions that undergo transverse biaxial loading by an instrumented thin contact tip. We demonstrate the salient features of mechanical models of the HTMECH assay and how they are employed to extract meaningful parameters from the raw data. The HTMECH instrument is compared and contrasted with conventional implementations of the dart impact and blister techniques. (c) 2005 American Institute of Physics.