Revolutionizing material analysis with 5x faster broadband optimized time-temperature superposition (BOTTS) for rapid viscoelastic property insights
Unmet Need
The Materials Genome Initiative Strategic Plan was adopted by the US in 2021 for the purposes of increasing knowledge on material structure property relationships to accelerate material development and innovation. This plan necessitates the acquisition of large amounts of data across an ever-growing catalog of new age materials and their attributes such as viscoelastic properties, which can be difficult and time consuming to produce. There is a need for techniques that can support the data acquisition required to fully document and describe these materials using more effective and time efficient methodologies.
Technology
Duke inventors have developed a method for rapidly acquiring broadband viscoelastic properties and performing time-temperature superposition (TTS) to form data rich master curves, which define and are needed to simulate a viscoelastic material’s behavior. This approach is intended to be integrated into existing dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) tools with broadband capabilities to enable fast acquisition of properties of viscoelastic polymer materials. Specifically, by using optimized frequency windows, optimized temperature selections, and other optimized experimental protocol options to extract viscoelastic properties of a material, significant time savings can be achieved in obtaining accurate TTS master curve results. This has been demonstrated to work 500% faster than comparable discrete frequency sweeps (DFS) in acquiring the viscoelastic master curves of model materials with identical capabilities in superposition to achieve master curves for further simulation and analysis.
Advantages
- Provides accurate acquisition of material master curve using measured TTS
- 5x faster than comparable broadband acquisition methods like DFS
- Utilizes existing DMA tool capabilities with new data processing