Determination of the creep function using atomic force microscope

Abstract In this paper, we demonstrate that determination of the creep function of polymeric materials is possible during the nanoindentation test. For this purpose, one has to solve an inverse ill-posed problem. We propose an algorithm that may be applied at the stage of static nanoindentation and then allows evaluating the creep function at the initial stages of loading. To confirm the effectiveness of this approach, we have performed multiple experiments on the indentation of polymeric materials using various loading programs and different indenters. Typical dependencies for the creep function for some materials are obtained.