Mechanical characterization of wood at the submicrometre scale: a prospective study
Résumé
Measuring the elasto(plastic) properties of an homogeneous and isotropic material is now usually available at the microscopic scale by using nanoindentation and AFM techniques. Some studies show the possibility to measure elastic properties of anisotropic materials, some approaches try to deter-mine the elastic properties of multi-layered isotropic material at the nano or micrometre scale and local measurements by nanoindentation on wood have already shown that mechanical properties of each cell wall layer can be estimated if these layers are sufficiently thick [1]. The goal here is to ex-tend these techniques to the case of any type of cell-wall layer using reverse identification of the me-chanical properties. As a first step, the measurement of elastic properties on reference materials like sulfur monocristal or polymers using different AFM techniques has been tried: nanoindentation with an AFM tip vs. force modulation mode, which already provides qualitative results on wood cell walls [2]. Theoretical lateral resolution and the sensibility to the apparent tip/sample contact have been estimated. Preliminary tests on wood specimens are under way.