| Polymer membranes have found their way in to a wide range of applications including selective barriers, protective coatings, packaging, sensors, and medical implants, becom- ing more pervasive in our lives every day. Their importance is derived not only from their unique mechanical and interfacial properties, but also from the versatility of their geometry. In this thesis, several polymer membrane geometries are employed to interfacially and mechanically characterize the properties of soft materials and polymer thin films. This thesis is organized in to two sections, the first deals with interfacial characterization using a membrane contact geometry. The centerpiece of this section, and this thesis, was the development of a sensitive membrane peel test to measure adhesion. A model membrane-contact system was used to evaluate an analytical model of large deformation contact and ultimately develop a simple protocol for measuring an adhesion energy using a membrane peel geometry. A second investigation in the section looked at the multiple harmonic behavior of quartz crystal resonators during contact mechanics experiments. An analytical solution to the radial mass sensitivity function was calculated and compared to experimentally measured sensitivity profiles from growing water drop and membrane contact experiments. The second half of this thesis deals with non-contact membrane geometries for mechanically characterizing two novel polymer membranes. The first is a highly water permeable sulfonated pentablock copolymer, designed for water purification applications. In this work these membranes were mechanically characterized with a biaxial creep test to investigate the affect of sulfonation level and processing conditions on their deformation behavior. Lastly pendant drop membranes were fabricated by ionically crosslinking amphiphilic gradient copolymers at an oil/water interface. These robust, self healing membranes were modeled with both an elastic and liquid interface analysis, and then mechanically characterized to investigate their processing-performance correlations. |
