A Novel MEMS Platform for Mechanical Testing of Polymeric Nanofibers

TL;DRAbstract

The objective of this project is the design and fabrication of a platform to study the mechanical behavior of electrospun polymer nanofibers. Among different methods of mechanical characterization of nanofibers such as nanoindentation, bending tests, and tensile testing, the latter is considered here as the primary approach to study the mechanical behavior of polymer nanofibers because of its advantages over other methods in investigating different mechanical behaviors including strain rate dependent mechanical responses and large deformations, both of which are expected in polymer nanofibers. Due to high ductility of electrospun nanofibers, the test platform should be capable of generating deformations of 100 microns on 25 microns long sample, while the net axial force applied on the fibers can be as high as 100 microN. The tensile testing apparatus described here for the above purposes is a MEMS device actuated using an on-chip MEMS capacitive based actuator, called nanotractor, with

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