Dear Malte, I once read something with carbon fibers but cannot remember the author. We did similar experiments with glass fibers. Have a look at Kuttner, C. et al. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces 2012, 4, 3485–3492.

and Kuttner, C.et al. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces 2013, 5, 2469–2478.

The first introduces the AFM force mapping and the second is about the targeted modification of a polymer coating at the fiber/matrix interface.

Dear Malte

We performed nanoindentation test on CFRP but no AFM measurements

Perhaps are you interested ?

Best regards

Alain

people have done some work looking at ultrasonic AFM (UAFM) on those materials, which is an older way to get the same sorts of information that peak force gets (I believe). You can find a bit about it in this http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-642-27494-7/page/1

I think it is one of those systems people used to look at with various other acoustic AFM techniques also.

Dear Malte

Are you interested in doing topography or modulus mapping? We are currently trying to find suitable references to plan modulus mapping of carbon fiber reinforced polymer and are having the same issues! I think there are some publications referring to glass fiber and carbon/carbon composites but hardly any on CFRP.

I have done PeakForce Quantitative Nanomechanical Mapping of protein aggregates. It's really very easy if you have some idea about the sample. For a very hard sample (>100 GPa), you should use diamond tips or carbon nanotube tips. There is a cheaper alternative made of highly dense carbon, which you may also use if the sample elastic modulus is less than 500 GPa.

The choice of cantilever stiffness is also very important. If it is too soft, then you simply won't be able to indent your sample and shall be bending the cantilever instead. For your sample, I would recommend to start with 30 N/m and go upto 200 N/m. For very soft and delicate samples, you should use less than 5 N/m. The sensitivity of measurement is maximum if the stiffness of your cantilever is the same as your sample and the tip is as hard as possible.

I thank you all for your reply's, contributions and citations.

Actually, I got the answer, which is most important for me: only little work has been done on this (or rather related) topics, and apparently I am not going to reinvent the wheel if I will spend some work on this topic.