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ZnS materials have been widely used in fluorescence biosensors to characterize different types of stem cells due to their excellent fluorescence effect. In this study, ZnS was prepared by vulcanizing nano-Zn particles synthesized using a DC arc plasma. The composition and structure of the ZnS materials were studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD), and their functional group information and optical properties were investigated by using IR spectrophotometry and UV-vis spectrophotometry. It has been found that the synthesized materials consist of Zn, cubic ZnS, and hexagonal ZnS according to the vulcanization parameters. Crystalline ZnS was gradually transformed from a cubic to a hexagonal structure, and the cycling properties first increase, then decrease with increasing sulfurization temperature. There is an optimal curing temperature giving the best cycling performance and specific capacity: the material sulfurized thereat mainly consists of cubic β-ZnS phase with a small quantity of Zn and hexagonal α-ZnS. The cubic phase ZnS has better conductivity than hexagonal ZnS, as evinced by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The ZnS (as prepared) shows board absorption, which can be used in fluorescence biosensors in cell imaging systems.

Instrumented indentation is a convenient and increasingly rapid method of high resolution mapping of surface properties. There is, however, significant untapped potential for the quantification of these properties, which is only possible by solving a number of serious issues that affect the absolute values for mechanical properties obtained from small indentations. The three most pressing currently are the quantification of: the indentation size effect (ISE), residual stress, and pile-up and sink-in—which is itself affected by residual stress and ISE. Hardness based indentation mapping is unable to distinguish these effects. We describe a procedure that uses an elastic modulus as an internal reference and combines the information available from an indentation modulus map, a hardness map, and a determination of the ISE coefficient (using self-similar geometry indentation) to correct for the effects of stress, pile up and the indentation size effect, to leave a quantified map of plastic damage and grain refinement hardening in a surface. This procedure is used to map the residual stress in a cross-section of the machined surface of a previously stress free metal. The effect of surface grinding is compared to milling and is shown to cause different amounts of work hardening, increase in residual stress, and surface grain size reduction. The potential use of this procedure for mapping coatings in cross-section is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instrumented indentation testing (IIT) at elevated temperatures has proved to be a useful tool to study plastic and elastic deformation and understand the performance of material components at (or nearer to) the actual temperatures experienced in-service. The value of elevated temperature IIT data, however, depends on the ability not only to achieve a stable, isothermal indentation contact at thermal equilibrium when taking data, but to be able to assign a valid temperature to that contact (and so to the data). The most common method found in the current literature is to use the calculated thermal drift rate as an indicator, but this approach has never been properly validated. This study proves that using the thermal drift rate to determine isothermal contact may lead to large errors in the determination of the real contact temperature. Instead, a more sensitive and validated method is demonstrated, based upon using the indenter tip and the tip heater control thermocouple as a reproducible and calibrated contact temperature sensor. A simple calibration procedure is described, along with step by step guidance to establish an isothermal contact at a known temperature under thermal equilibrium when conducting elevated temperature IIT experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods to obtain tensile stress-strain properties of materials from a practically non-destructive indentation test are of great industrial interest. Nanoindentation is a good candidate. However, to do this successfully, indentation size effects must be accounted for. An indentation size effect with spherical indenters has been shown for a range of fcc metals with relatively large grain size (Spary et al 2006 Phil. Mag. 86 5581-93); the increase in yield stress being proportional to the inverse cube root of indenter radius. Here, we investigate these differences further and present results for the indentation size effect with spherical indenters on Cu samples with a range of different grain sizes from 1 µm to single crystal. The important experimental control parameter, of the relative size of the indentation compared with the grain size, is also explored by using indenters of different radii on the different grain sized samples. When the grain size, d, is less than 6 times the radius of the projected contact area, a, a Hall-Petch-like behaviour is observed superimposed on the indentation size effect. For d > 6a the indentation size effect dominates. The two effects may be combined by addition in quadrature. This new parametric function is able to predict the indentation pressure in annealed copper given input values of indenter radius and grain size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In nanoindentation, the plasticity size effect has been observed for several years, where a higher hardness is measured as contact size decreases. For spherical indenters, Lim and Chaudhri (1999 Phil. Mag. 79 2979) first showed that the entire flow curve appears at higher contact pressures for smaller radius indenters in copper. However, few papers have reported the initial yield size effect due to the difficulty in defining the yield point. Recently, Spary et al (2006 Phil. Mag. 86 5581) demonstrated that the initial yield strength of metals increases linearly with inverse cube root of indenter radius, by nanoindentation together with finite elemental modelling. Here, we use a clear method to determine the onset of plasticity in spherical nanoindentation without the uncertainties of modelling. This enables us to measure the yield pressure of tungsten metal and a series of ceramics with a high degree of accuracy and over a large range of indenter radii (hundreds of nanometres to several tens of micrometres). Our data of all ceramics and metals show clearly that there is a significant yield strength enhancement, which is inversely proportional to the cube root of the indenter radius. Normalizing the data for each material by its yield pressure for an infinite radius indenter, we find that the data for metals and ceramics fall on lines of different slope, indicating that material parameters influence the indentation yield strength size effect as well as the geometrical size effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]