Nanoindentation studies on crosslinking and curing effects of PDMS

Nanoindentation testing was used to investigate the mechanical properties of PDMS focusing on two aspects: Firstly, the results give a comprehensive overview of the mechanical behavior of PDMS Sylgard 184 which guides the property tailoring for many different application fields, where the mechanical behavior needs to be considered, but is not readily accessible. Secondly, the ability to measure the slight differences in the mechanical properties of these PDMS samples emphasized the high sensitivity of this technique and underlined its reliability for application on very compliant materials. The indentation results obtained in this study did not deviate from complementary tensile test data more than 5%. It was found that the elastic moduli of differently crosslinked samples cover a range of 2 orders of magnitude; for one and the same PDMS the modulus may increase 10-fold as a function of curing time.