The screencast about NanoWorld Arrow Silicon AFM probes held byNanoWorld AG CEO Manfred Detterbeck has just passed the 500 views mark. Congratulations Manfred!
NanoWorld Arrow™ AFM probes are designed for easy AFM tip positioning and high resolution AFM imaging and are very popular with AFM users due to the highly symetric scans that are possible with these AFM probes because of their special tip shape. They fit to all well-known commercial SPMs (Scanning Probe Microscopes) and AFMs (Atomic Force Microscopes). The Arrow AFM probe consists of an AFM probe support chip with an AFM cantilever which has a tetrahedral AFM tip at its triangular free end.
The Arrow AFM probe is entirely made of monolithic, highly doped silicon.
The unique Arrow™ shape of the AFM cantilever with the AFM tip always placed at the very end of the AFM cantilever allows easy positioning of the AFM tip on the area of interest.
The Arrow AFM probes are available for non-contact mode, contact mode and force modulation mode imaging and are also available with a conductive platinum iridum coating. Furthermore the Arrow™ AFM probe series also includes a range of tipless AFM cantilevers and AFM cantilever arrays as well as dedicated ultra-high frequency Arrow AFM probes for high speed AFM.
To find out more about the different variations please have a look at:
You can also find various application examples for the Arrow AFM probes in the NanoWorld blog. For a selection of these articles just click on the “Arrow AFM probes” tag on the bottom of this blog entry.
Despite being rather old, the Viscose
process still is the most important and frequently used technology for the
production of regenerated wood based fibers with annual production volumes
exceeding 3.5 million tons, mainly for the textile industry.*
However,
there are several environmental drawbacks of this technology. For instance, the
necessity to use CS2 to form the cellulose precursor material (cellulose
xanthate, CX), as well as the development of volatile sulfur containing
compounds (e.g. H2S, COS) during the regeneration procedure requires complex
recovery technologies, which manifest into higher prices of the final fiber
products.*
Another technology that has raised attention in recent years is the Carbacell process. The Carbacell process relies on cellulose carbamate (CC), which is easily obtained by reacting cellulose with urea. CC is soluble in cold alkali and can be subjected to wet spinning processes similar to those in viscose plants.*
In their article: “Cellulose carbamate derived cellulose thin films: preparation, characterization and blending with cellulose xanthate” Michael Weißl, Mathias Andreas Hobisch, Leena Sisko Johansson, Kay Hettrich, Eero Kontturi, Bert Volkert and Stefan Spirk introduce a new system for manufacturing cellulose thin films based on ecofriendly CC. *
Since CC is water soluble, the use of organic solvents is omitted compared to the other often employed cellulose derivative, TMSC. In addition, CC can be synthesized in large scale via environmentally friendly procedures. The regeneration process itself does not require any additional treatment but is induced by increasing the NaOH concentration during the spin-coating via evaporation of the water, as confirmed by IR and XPS spectroscopy.*
Atomic Force Microscopy in tapping mode using a NanoWorld Arrow-NCR AFM probe was employed to gain further information about the surface morphology and structure of the CC films.
Fig. 3 from “Cellulose carbamate derived cellulose thin films: preparation, characterization and blending with cellulose xanthate” by Michael Weißl et al.: 2 × 2 µm2 AFM height (upper row) and phase (lower row) images of CC based thin films after spin coating and rinsing with water; starting with concentrations from 1.0 to 1.5, 2.0 and 2.5 wt%
*Michael Weißl, Mathias Andreas Hobisch, Leena Sisko Johansson, Kay Hettrich, Eero Kontturi, Bert Volkert, Stefan Spirk Cellulose carbamate derived cellulose thin films: preparation, characterization and blending with cellulose xanthate Cellulose, August 2019, Volume 26, Issue 12, pp 7399–7410 Doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10570-019-02600-z
Open Access: The paper « Cellulose carbamate derived cellulose thin films: preparation, characterization and blending with cellulose xanthate » by Michael Weißl, Mathias Andreas Hobisch, Leena Sisko Johansson, Kay Hettrich, Eero Kontturi, Bert Volkert and Stefan Spirk is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
