Stable instrument temperature with SURFACE stabilizer
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Features
- Temperature control in closed indenter housing maintains stable and homogeneous experimental conditions
- Housing temperature can be set in the range 20…30 °C, resolution 0.01 °C
- Offset to room temperature 5…10 °C, depending on insulation of housing
- Temperature stability up to 0.02 °C, during constant external conditions
- Available as upgrade for many instruments
- Designed for G200 Nanoindenter from Agilent
Full Control of the Ambient Conditions inside Your Instrument Housing
Nanoindentation measurements are prone to drift issues, because the high accuracy with sub-nanometer resolution of the nanoindentation technique can be adversely affected by the variation of the ambient temperature. Maintaining a higly stabilized laboratory temperature is cumbersome and expensive.
The SURFACE stabilizer overcomes these problems by gentle cooling or heating of the nanoindenter housing to control the indenter temperature. This allows precise and highly repeatable measurements.
Performance of the Temperature Regulation for Varying Room Temperature
Controller enabled
- Room temperature in laboratory changes due to daylight and weather
- Temperature of the instrument is set to 22 °C
- Feedback loop of the controller maintains a stable temperate
- Temperature deviations below 0.02 °C
- Large temperature peak: heating up of the laboratory, than ventilating with cool air
- Room temperature variations are compensated by the stabilizer
Controller disabled
- Instrument heats up when control is disabled
- Room temperature variations are apparent in instrument temperature
- Constant offset in temperature with little damping of temperature modulation
- Room temperature has to be very stable for precise measurements!
Temperature with stabilizer enabled
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Temperature with stabilizer disabled
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Advantages for Nanoindentation Using the Stabilizer
Temperature and drift rates
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The plot on the right shows the instrument temperature and indentation drift rates, first without temperature control, and later with the SURFACE stabilizer temperature control enabled.
No temperature control
- Room temperature decreases during the night and increases for the day
- Drift rate is low in the morning, increases during the day to 0.15 nm/s
- High drift rates in the afternoon!
Temperature control enabled
- Drift rates well below 0.05 nm/s
- Average drift: 0.016 nm/s
- Accurate measurements over the whole day!
Low Scatter in Mechanical Measurements over Extended Time Scales
Measurement stability
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The plot shows repeated indentation measurements on fused silica using the stabilizer:
- Load vs. displacement curves for a Berkovich indenter using a standard indentation method.
- Displayed are 25 curves, measured over a span of 12 hours.
- No surface find correction or drift correction has been applied to the data!
- Very high stability, no additional noise due to the temperature control
