Abstract Scope |
Nanowires find applications ranging from nanodevices, which utilize individual nanostructures, to nanostructured materials, which utilize millions of them. Individual-nanowire mechanical testing, especially coupled with in-situ microscopy, has revealed important insights into their elastic and failure properties. These insights have been instrumental for nanodevice design, and to predict how nanowires might behave in macroscale nanostructured materials. However, nanostructured materials employ millions of nanostructures to achieve function, thus requiring new experiments that reveal statistical failure information. In this talk, I will describe our efforts to characterize elasticity, failure, and plasticity of individual nanowires, and how this knowledge now informs novel high-throughput testing techniques. These new techniques, based on microfluidics and self-assembly, allow us to pattern in an ordered way many nanowires over flexible substrates, for subsequent testing and analysis. The techniques allow us to obtain failure, strength, and fatigue statistics, which are important for nanostructured materials such as stretchable electronics. |