Nanomechanical properties like roughness or hardness influence many of the functionalities of modern products and production instruments. These properties are tactile in nature and, hence, best directly measured with mechanical probes. Such probing, however, requires carefully controlling of the interaction strength to avoid damages of both workpiece and probe. An example of a successful implementation is the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM), where solutions for applied and basic research in a laboratory environment had been developed over the past decades.
The challenges for transporting nanomechanical measurements to a production line are the significantly higher vibrational disturbances, the larger size of the samples (i.e. the workpiece) and the lack of trained operators who can e.g. recognize whether the AFM probe needs to be replaced.
Robot-based mounting and a virtual stiff connection between the instrument and the workpiece together with a method for monitoring the tip-radius allowed us to conduct AFM measurements in a environment that mimicked conditions of a production line.

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Bio

Urs Staufer is full professor and leader of the section Micro and Nano Engineering at the faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the TU Delft. He received his PhD in solid state physics from the University of Basel in 1990. He then did postdoctoral work on micro-instrumentation at IBM in Yorktown Heights (USA) and Rüschlikon (CH), and at the Universities of Basel and Neuchâtel. In 2003 he became associated professor in Neuchatel. In 2007 he was named full professor at the TU Delft, where he was department head from 2012 - 2016 and deputy dean from 2015 - 2016. Since 2017 he is chairing the steering committee of the International Conference on Micro and Nano Engineering.
His research interest is in scientific and advanced instrumentation for nano engineering.