Peeling by pulling: In situ SEM blister test on nanoflakes

Dear iMechanicians,

I want to share our recent work published in Nano Letters on the blister test of nanoflakes. The title, abstract, and links for data are as follows:

Pull-to-Peel of Two-Dimensional Materials for the Simultaneous Determination of Elasticity and Adhesion 

Zheng Fang, Zhaohe Dai*, Bingjie Wang, Zhongzheng Tian, Chuanli Yu, Qing Chen, and Xianlong Wei*

The flexible and clinging nature of ultrathin films requires an understanding of their elastic and adhesive properties in a wide range of circumstances from fabrications to applications. Simultaneously measuring both properties, however, is extremely difficult as the film thickness diminishes to the nanoscale. Here we address such difficulties through peeling by pulling thin films off from the substrates (we thus refer to it as “pull-to-peel”). Particularly, we perform in situ pull-to-peel of graphene and MoS2 films in a scanning electron microscope and achieve simultaneous determination of their Young’s moduli and adhesions to gold substrates. This is in striking contrast to other conceptually similar tests available in the literature, including indentation tests (only measuring elasticity) and spontaneous blisters (only measuring adhesion). Furthermore, we show a weakly nonlinear Hooke’s relation for the pull-to-peel response of two-dimensional materials, which may be harnessed for the design of nanoscale force sensors or exploited in other thin-film systems.

The data for this work is available from GitHub. If any questions, please post them here or on the ResearchGate page of this work -  I am happy to take them.

Thanks for your attention. 

Zhaohe