The transient plane source (TPS) method is a relatively newly developed transient approach for thermal conductivity measurement. Compared with the steady-state method, it is fast, and applicable to either solid, liquid or gas state materials; therefore, it has gained much popularity in recent years. However, during measurement, the measured power is influenced by the heat capacity of the electrical isolation films as well as the electrical resistance change of the metallic thin wire of the TPS probes. This further influences the measurement precision. Meanwhile, these two factors have been ignored in the traditional model of TPS developed by Gustafsson. In this paper, the influence of both the heat capacity and the resistance change of the TPS probe on the measured power is studied, and mathematical formulas relating the two factors and their respective corrections are deduced. Thereafter an improved model is suggested based on the traditional TPS model and the above theoretical models. Experiments on polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) standard materials have been conducted using a home-made system, including TPS probes, data acquisition module and analysis software. The results show that the improved model can effectively improve the measurement precision of the TPS method by about 1.8–2.3% as evaluated by relative standard deviation.

Ultra-short cantilevers are a new type of cantilever designed for the next generation of high-speed atomic force microscope (HS-AFM). Ultra-short cantilevers have smaller dimensions and higher resonant frequency than conventional AFM cantilevers. Moreover, their geometry may also be different from the conventional beam-shape or V-shape. These changes increase the difficulty of determining the spring constant for ultra-short cantilevers, and hence limit the accuracy and precision of force measurement based on a HS-AFM. This paper presents an experimental method to calibrate the effective spring constant of ultra-short cantilevers. By using a home-made AFM head, the cantilever is bent against an electromagnetic compensation balance under servo control. Meanwhile the bending force and the cantilever deflection are synchronously measured by the balance and the optical lever in the AFM head, respectively. Then the effective spring constant is simply determined as the ratio of the force to the corresponding deflection. Four ultra-short trapezoid shape cantilevers were calibrated using this method. A quantitative uncertainty analysis showed that the combined relative standard uncertainty of the calibration result is less than 2%, which is better than the uncertainty of any previously reported techniques.

A hybrid atomic force microscopic (AFM) measurement system combined with white light scanning interferometry for micro/nanometer dimensional measurement is developed. The system is based on a high precision large-range positioning platform with nanometer accuracy on which a white light scanning interferometric module and an AFM head are built. A compact AFM head is developed using a self-sensing tuning fork probe. The head need no external optical sensors to detect the deflection of the cantilever, which saves room on the head, and it can be directly fixed under an optical microscopic interferometric system. To enhance the system’s dynamic response, the frequency modulation (FM) mode is adopted for the AFM head. The measuring data can be traceable through three laser interferometers in the system. The lateral scanning range can reach 25 mm × 25 mm by using a large-range positioning platform. A hybrid method combining AFM and white light scanning interferometry is proposed to improve the AFM measurement efficiency. In this method, the sample is measured firstly by white light scanning interferometry to get an overall coarse morphology, and then, further measured with higher resolution by AFM. Several measuring experiments on standard samples demonstrate the system’s good measurement performance and feasibility of the hybrid measurement method.

In this paper, the principle of surface acoustic wave techniques and their application to the monitoring of cracks are presented and compared to other classic non-destructive techniques. A practical classification of methods regarding the excitation and detection of surface acoustic waves is enumerated, among them, laser-generated surface acoustic wave technique is carefully analyzed as a prospective technique, and two important detection methods using piezoelectric and light deflection are described. Then, the strategies and variables used in crack monitoring based on laser-generated surface acoustic wave technique are reviewed. To achieve the goal of quantitative detection of cracks, most researchers use numerical models and experiments to characterize main crack features. Discussions and prospective approaches for further quantitative monitoring of cracks are provided.

The present paper presents the design and development results of a system setup for measuring Young's modulus of thin films by laser-induced surface acoustic waves based on the integration of two detection methods, namely, piezoelectric transducer detection and differential confocal detection, which may be used for conducting consecutive or simultaneous measurements. After demonstrating the capabilities of each detection approach, it is shown how, depending on a wider range of applications, sample materials and measurement environments, the developed integrated system inherits and harnesses the main characteristics of its detection channels, resulting in an more practical and flexible equipment for determining Young's modulus than traditional nanoindentation equipment, and also suitable for cross-validation purposes.