High Throughput Mechanical Quantification of Glassy Thin Films using Additively Manufactured Elastomeric Lattices

Understanding the improved toughness, stiffness, and fracture resistance achieved with nanoscale thin films are crucial to numerous technologies, ranging from soft robotics to medicine, energy storage, and smart separation membranes. However, the development of structure-composition-processing-performance relationships are hinder by the lack of techniques that rapidly quantify the plasticity and failure mechanisms of these thin films, especially in relevant environments. In this work, we will discuss a high throughput concept to measure the elastic moduli, plasticity and failure strain of thin polymer films. Building from the copper grid technique developed by Lauterwasser and Kramer, we design an additively manufacture compliant elastomeric lattices to replace the traditionally rigid grid. The geometry of the lattice with differing Poisson’s ratios transduces macroscopic, uniform, in-plane deformation into a wide range of local deformation fields at each lattice cell. By placing a thin polystyrene film on top of the lattice structure, each cell acts as a unique deformation stage, allowing simultaneous mapping of the yield and fracture envelope. Combining this with optical techniques and image processing, enables statistically robust analysis of various parameters in parallel.