Stiff

This type of coil was prepared from copper cladded printed circuit board material by applying photolithographic techniques. The p.c. board material is available with difierent copper thicknesses and with either a stiff or a flexible carrier. The flexible material offers the opportunity to adapt the planar coil to a curved three dimensional test object. In our turbine blade application this is a major advantage. The thickness of the copper layer was chosen to be 17 pm The period of the coil was 100 pm The coils were patterned by wet etching, A major advantage of this approach is the parallel processing with narrow tolerances, resulting in many identical Eddy current probes. An example of such a probe is shown in fig. 10. 

A major advance in force measurement was the development by Tabor, Win-terton and Israelachvili of a surface force apparatus (SFA) involving crossed cylinders coated with molecularly smooth cleaved mica sheets [11, 28]. A current version of an apparatus is shown in Fig. VI-4 from Ref. 29. The separation between surfaces is measured interferometrically to a precision of 0.1 nm the surfaces are driven together with piezoelectric transducers. The combination of a stiff double-cantilever spring with one of a number of measuring leaf springs provides force resolution down to 10 dyn (10 N). Since its development, several groups have used the SFA to measure the retarded and unretarded dispersion forces, electrostatic repulsions in a variety of electrolytes, structural and solvation forces (see below), and numerous studies of polymeric and biological systems. 

Modification of an AFM to operate in a dynamic mode aids the study of soft biological materials [58]. Here a stiff cantilever is oscillated near its resonant frequency with an amplitude of about 0.5 nm forces are detected as a shift to a new frequency... 

The index J can label quantum states of the same or different chemical species. Equation (A3.13.20) corresponds to a generally stiff initial value problem [42, 43]. In matrix notation one may write ... 

When the lever is intended for use with the tip separated from the surface, the lever stiffness is usually greater... 

Pulsed-force mode AFM (PFM-AFM) is a method introduced for fast mapping of local stiffness and adliesion with lower required data storage than recording force-distance curves at each point on the x-y plane [115]. A sinusoidal or triangular modulation is applied between the tip and sample (either via lever or sample piezo) at a lower frequency than that of either the piezo or cantilever resonance frequency. Tip and sample then come... 

The parameter /r tunes the stiffness of the potential. It is chosen such that the repulsive part of the Leimard-Jones potential makes a crossing of bonds highly improbable (e.g., k= 30). This off-lattice model has a rather realistic equation of state and reproduces many experimental features of polymer solutions. Due to the attractive interactions the model exhibits a liquid-vapour coexistence, and an isolated chain undergoes a transition from a self-avoiding walk at high temperatures to a collapsed globule at low temperatures. Since all interactions are continuous, the model is tractable by Monte Carlo simulations as well as by molecular dynamics. Generalizations of the Leimard-Jones potential to anisotropic pair interactions are available e.g., the Gay-Beme potential [29]. This latter potential has been employed to study non-spherical particles that possibly fomi liquid crystalline phases. 

Salto N, Takahashi K and Yunoli Y 1967 The statistical mechanical theory of stiff chains J Phys. See. Japan 22 219... 

It is not possible to apply (C2.1.1) down to the level of monomers and replace by the degree of polymerization N and f by the sum of the squares of the bond lengths in the monomer because the chemical constitution imposes some stiffness to the chain on the length scale of a few monomer units. This effect is accounted for by introducing the characteristic ratio defined as C- — The characteristic ratio can be detennined... 

Ceramic fonning typically involves using pressure to compact and mould particles to the desired size and shape. Ceramics can be fonned from slurries, pastes, plastic bodies (i.e. such as a stiff mud), and from wet and dry powders. 

In this section we describe the behavior of a ligand subjected to three types of external forces a constant force, forces exerted by a moving stiff harmonic spring, and forces exerted by a soft harmonic spring. We then present a method of reconstruction of the potential of mean force from SMD force measurements employing a stiff spring (Izrailev et al., 1997 Balsera ct al., 1997). 

Stiff Spring For a stiff spring, satisfying K (fiUjdx, under the overdamped condition assumed in (3) the average force measured by the spring can be expressed as... 

The rupture force measured in AFM experiments is given, therefore, by the average slope of the energy profile minus a correction related to the effects of thermal fluctuations. Equation (11) demonstrates that the rupture force measured in AFM experiments grows linearly with the activation energy of the system (Chilcotti et ah, 1995). A comparison of (10) and (11) shows that the unbinding induced by stiff springs in SMD simulations, and that induced by AFM differ drastically, and that the forces measured by both techniques cannot be readily related. 

M. E. Tuckerman and B. J. Berne. Molecular dynamics in systems with multiple time scales Systems with stiff and soft degrees of freedom and with short and long range forces. J. Comp. Chem., 95 8362-8364, 1992. 

E. Hairer and G. Wanner. Solving Ordinary Differential Equations II. Stiff and Differential-Algebraic Problems, volume 14 of Springer Series in Computational Mathematics. Springer-Verlag, New York, New York, second edition, 1996. 

As our first model problem, we take the motion of a diatomic molecule under an external force field. For simplicity, it is assumed that (i) the motion is pla nar, (ii) the two atoms have equal mass m = 1, and (iii) the chemical bond is modeled by a stiff harmonic spring with equilibrium length ro = 1. Denoting the positions of the two atoms hy e 71, i = 1,2, the corresponding Hamiltonian function is of type... 

The standard discretization for the equations (9) in molecular dynamics is the (explicit) Verlet method. Stability considerations imply that the Verlet method must be applied with a step-size restriction k < e = j2jK,. Various methods have been suggested to avoid this step-size barrier. The most popular is to replace the stiff spring by a holonomic constraint, as in (4). For our first model problem, this leads to the equations d... 

We apply the semi-implicit algorithm to handle the weak potentials Vi, and the energy conserving method (16) for the stiff forces. The maximal error in the total energy, i.e. 

Next, we replace the stiff spring potential a(r — 1) /2 by the Morse potential... 

---