Hysitron/Bruker TS 77 Select

The Hysitron TS 77 Select nanomechanical and nanotribological test system built around Bruker’s renowned TriboScope capacitive transducer technology is a test system delivering reliable mechanical and tribological characterization over nanometer-to-micrometer length scales.

The installed transducer allows to perform different micro- and nano-mechanical tests with both normal and lateral force-displacement sensing. This enables ESI to perform standard depth-sensing nanoindentation within the loading force range up to 10 mN or displacement range up to 5 µm with options to run in displacement or load controlled tests with a constant loading or displacement rate, pillar or special specimen’s compression testing, tribological and adhesion scratch testing, wear tests enabling the abrasion of the specified sample area and the height imaging of the specimens with the indenter tip in contact mode, scanning over the surface of the specimen. The TS 77 Select test system allows manual testing, the automation of any of the previously mentioned methods (enabling the long testing runs of hundreds or thousands consecutive tests without the need for user’s input during the testing) and, additionally, fast mechanical properties mapping with visualization of the reduced elastic modulus and hardness over the tested area. The software includes automated mechanical properties calculation and calibration. The test setup is equipped with optical microscope with camera for the site-specific positioning and the height scanning imaging allows a precise positioning over the micro- to nano-scale features with nanometer-scale resolution. The transducer can be equipped with a large range of indenter tips, e.g. with Berkovich, cube-corner, sphero-conical, or flat punch.

Up to now a large number of tests were performed with the TS 77 Select nanoindenter: tens of thousands depth-sensing nanoindents with the contact depths ranging from 10 nm to 500 nm and on materials ranging from polymers used in cinemagraphic films to tungsten or carbides and minerals (rocks), adhesion measurements with use of either buckling delamination provoked by indents or by scratching the surface of the specimen, high-throughput micromechanical testing with 3D-printed cantilever beams and push-to-pull devices (with use of flat punch), fast mapping of mechanical properties over thin lamellar structures and inhomogeneous, anisotropic materials combined with numerous height scanning to provide precise indent/test localization and visualization of tested sample’s features.