ME DEPARTMENTAL SEMINAR

Friday, February 13, 2004

1:30pm – 2:30pm

2233 GG BROWN

Rodney S. Ruoff

John Evans Professor

Director, NU BIMat Center

Department of Mechanical Engineering

“New Materials and Tools & Methods, for Nanoscale Mechanics”

Abstract:

We present a survey of our work on manipulating nanostructures, and measuring mechanical properties of nanostructures, in addition to a description of the synthesis and characterization of Boron nanoribbons and nanowires.

The challenge of well configuring nanoscale mechanics experiments is daunting, but not insurmountable. We have realized in the past few years that our approaches to nanoscale operations such as pick, place, clamp, and load inside of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) should benefit from new methods that also will enable the new field of nanorobotics. Simply configuring an experiment on a nanotube (nanowire, psuedo-1d nano-object) so that pure tensile load is applied, and even knowing to very high accuracy the true components of force of the load on the nanoobject, are currently non-trivial, but with the introduction of new methods, some borrowed from macroscale robotics, they may become trivial in the future. The SEM has excellent resolution in X and Y but relatively poor resolution in Z. I outline our current work aimed at much more rapid assembly (configuration) of nanoscale mechanics experiments, including pullout experiments, and the introduction of a suite of new methods that are meant to enhance our knowledge of the orientation of nanostructure and testing components (and load force components) in the SEM. Perhaps undergraduate researchers will soon be doing what only very experienced research scientists are now attempting, and a whole new range of experiments will become possible, from further development of such new approaches and methods.

We gratefully acknowledge the grant support from the Office of Naval Research "Mechanics of Nanostructures" grant under award No. N000140210870, the NASA Langley Research Center for Computational Materials: Nanotechnology Modeling and Simulation Program, the NASA University Research, Engineering and Technology Institute on Bio Inspired Materials (BIMat) under award No. NCC-1-02037, and the NSF grant no. 0200797 “Mechanics of Nanoropes” (Ken Chong and Oscar Dillon, program managers).