Deformation of Free-Standing Polymer Nanocomposite Thin Films

The mechanical properties of polymer nanocomposite thin films are central to their applications as impact mitigating materials and flexible electronics. As a non-contact and substrate-free method, bulge tests (or nanobubble inflation tests) provide many advantages to determine the elastic and viscoelastic behavior of free-standing thin films and they are amenable to cyclic loading and time independent creep measurements. Previous work has extensively utilized interferometric bulge tests. We discuss combining bulge tests with laser scanning confocal microscopy to obtain the 3D profile of bulged films. We apply this technique to obtain the mechanical properties of free-standing polymer nanocomposite thin films (PNCs), which have the potential to be integrated in high demand applications such as drug delivery, energy storage, novel packaging, and membrane filtration.