Wire Accelerated Life Cycle Tester

Fort Wayne Metals is interested in developing a new machine to experimentally test fatigue strength of various metal wiring manufactured by their company. The test rotates a wire while arced so that the peak experiences equal amount of tension and compressive loading until the sample breaks from cyclic loading. The wiring has a wide range of applications from industrial cable used in military helicopters to a more apparent use, medical wiring which includes neurostimulation and cardiac lead wire.The company has specifically requested the design of this system have more functional components integrated unlike their more primitive machines currently in use. This includes, but is not limited to, an integrated bath design to wet test samples in a circulating saline solution with a calibrated way to adjust the arc dimensions of the sample.Electronically, Fort Wayne Metals also requests a functional user interface to program test duration in terms of cycle count that the wire experiences. Likewise, the end design requires a form of break detection if the sample fails before the test duration is completed and an appropriate method of kill switching the motor as well as recording the cycle count at time of failure. Additional specific considerations regarding test conditions and housing have also been specified by the company.This document will discuss all requirements applied to the evolution of designs conducted by IPFW’s senior capstone design team during the fall months of 2012. Particular elaboration regarding design evaluation, cost analysis, and manufacturing plans are also taken into consideration and documented

Structure and macroscopic tackiness of ultra-thin pressure sensitive adhesive films

Ultrathin layers of the statistical copolymer P(nBA-stat-MA) with a majority of n-butyl acrylate (nBA) and a minority of methyl acrylate (MA) are characterized with respect to the film morphology and the mechanical response in a probe tack test. The probed copolymer can be regarded as a model system of a pressure sensitive adhesive (PSA). The films are prepared by spin-coating which enables an easy thickness control via the polymer concentration of the solution. The film thickness is determined with x-ray reflectivity (XRR) and white light interferometry (WLI). Grazing incidence small angle x-ray scattering (GISAXS) provides detailed and statistically significant information about the film morphology. Two types of lateral structures are identified and no strong correlation of these structures with the PSA film thickness is observed. In contrast, prominent parameters of the probe tack test, such as the stress maximum and the tack energy, exhibit an exponential dependence on the film thickness

Restructuring in block copolymer thin films:In situ GISAXS investigations during solvent vapor annealing

Block copolymer (BCP) thin films have been proposed for a number of nanotechnology applications, such as nanolithography and as nanotemplates, nanoporous membranes and sensors. Solvent vapor annealing (SVA) has emerged as a powerful technique for manipulating and controlling the structure of BCP thin films, e.g., by healing defects, by altering the orientation of the microdomains and by changing the morphology. Due to high time resolution and compatibility with SVA environments, grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) is an indispensable technique for studying the SVA process, providing information of the BCP thin film structure both laterally and along the film normal. Especially, state-of-the-art combined GISAXS/SVA setups at synchrotron sources have facilitated in situ and real-time studies of the SVA process with a time resolution of a few seconds, giving important insight into the pathways and mechanisms of SVA induced restructuring. We give a short introduction to the GISAXS method and review recent theoretical studies, experimental techniques such as sample preparation and in situ chambers together with SVA protocols, and we review and discuss experimental results. We conclude by giving an outlook on emerging developments of the in situ real-time GISAXS scattering technique in combination with new approaches to control BCP thin film structures using SVA