Thursday, September 25, 2008
2008 R&D 100 Winner
As nanoscale science has grown in recent years, so have the limitations of existing thermal analysis tools in the polymer and pharmaceutical industries. Existing bulk analyzers only provide sample-averaged thermal properties by heating the whole sample, which is often too large. The need to examine heterogeneity of increasingly refined samples prompted Anasys Instruments, Santa Barbara, Calif., and the Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to design VESTA, a thermal analyzer able to obtain localized micron-level data of heterogeneous samples and surfaces and perform in situ failure analysis at the same scale. VESTA is the first such tool to operate on a point-and-click basis, allowing users to identify features of interest using an integrated optical microscope. Thermo probes with variable 30-nm to 5-m end radius rapidly heats samples as small as a few picograms in size to 500°C at a high 600,000°C/min rate. This is 1,000 times faster than other analyzers, which means VESTA can execute a large number of measurements using a preprogrammed array of sample sites. Perhaps most importantly, the built-in microscope eliminates the need for atomic force microscopy for localized nanoscale thermal analysis.
Technology
Thermal analyzer
Developers
Anasys Instruments
Univ. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
