ASMEC provides hardware, software and services for the characterisation and analysis of mechanical surface properties in the micro and nano range. It was founded in 2003 as a spin-off from the Institute of Physics of the University of Technology Chemnitz. The Universal Nanomechanical Tester (UNAT) is a novel instrument for the measurement of mechanical surface properties in the micro and nano range. The unique feature of the instrument is the application of two completely independent measuring heads for the measurement of normal and lateral load-displacement curves with equal nanometre resolution. Due to the combination of both measuring heads, the UNAT can be used as hardness, wear, scratch, micro tensile and fatigue tester, as well as a profilometer.

The simple replacement of the conventional diamond tips by indenters of any solid material, allows the investigation of the original material contact in a tribological application with unrivalled accuracy. High resolution optics provide well resolved images of small indents or wear tracks. The fully automatic instrument can also be combined with an atomic force microscope or a white light confocal microscope.

‘Elastica’ user friendly software ensures fast analysis of coated systems in respect to their mechanical strength during surface contact. Furthermore it enables the extraction of Young’s modulus values of thin films down to some nanometre thickness from purely elastic load-displacement measurements.

‘Indent Analyser’ is the ultimate software for the analysis of indentation data. The data analysis is carried out in accordance with ISO 14577. The software offers very sophisticated routines for thermal drift correction, zero point correction, area function or radius function calibration, calibration of instrument compliance and others. In an extensive comparison program together with the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing (BAM), it was shown that hardness and modulus results obtained with this software provide excellent correlation with reference values.

For further details please contact: alan.thomas@zwick.co.uk