Abstract
Structural superlubricity (SSL) is a state of nearly zero friction and zero wear between two directly contacted solid surfaces. Recently, SSL was achieved in mesoscale and thus opened the SSL technology which promises great applications in Micro-electromechanical Systems (MEMS), sensors, storage technologies, etc. However, load issues in current mesoscale SSL studies are still not clear. The great challenge is to simultaneously measure both the ultralow shear forces and the much larger normal forces, although the widely used frictional force microscopes (FFM) and micro tribometers can satisfy the shear forces and normal forces requirements, respectively. Here we propose a hybrid two-axis force sensor that can well fill the blank between the capabilities of FFM and micro tribometers for the mesoscopic SSL studies. The proposed sensor can afford 1mN normal load with 10 nN lateral resolution. Moreover, the probe of the sensor is designed at the edge of the structure for the convenience of real-time optical observation. Calibrations and preliminary experiments are conducted to validate the performance of the design.
Highlights
The concept of structural superlubricity (SSL) dates to 1983 [1], from the first SSL observation in 2004 [2] to date, experimental studies of SSL have still been mostly in the nanoscale [3,4,5,6,7].for practical applications in most cases, the contact scale needs to be much larger
There is a blank of the general tools which is circled by the dotted line
We develop a hybrid sensor
Summary
The concept of structural superlubricity (SSL) dates to 1983 [1], from the first SSL observation in 2004 [2] to date, experimental studies of SSL have still been mostly in the nanoscale [3,4,5,6,7].for practical applications in most cases, the contact scale needs to be much larger. Studies on large scale SSL (mesoscale: One dimension of the system is from 1 μm to 1 mm) have attracted much attention [9,10,11,12,13]. Friction behavior with respect to different loading conditions in current mesoscale SSL studies is not clear, which causes other crucial problems towards practical applications [6,11,13,14]. The two widely used tools for tribology studies are frictional force microscopes (FFM, a kind of AFM (Atomic Force Microscope) specialized of the tribology) and tribometers. Most of the commercial AFM probes are designed for the purpose of small force detections, which have a normal stiffness in the order of 0.1–100
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