Influence of force volume indentation parameters and processing method in wood cell walls nanomechanical studies

Since the established correlations between mechanical properties of a piece of wood at the macroscopic scale and those of the cell wall at the submicron scale, techniques based on atomic force microscopy (AFM) have become widespread. In particular Peak Force tapping, allowing the differentiation of various layers, has become the new standard for wood cell wall’s nanomechanical characterization. However, its use requires fully elastic indentation, a good knowledge of stiffness of the probe and assumes a perfect tip shape of known radius (sphere) or angle (cone). Those strong hypotheses can result in large approximations in the extracted parameters for complex, nanostructured, and stiff and viscous materials such as wood. In this work, we propose a reliable and complementary alternative based on AFM force-volume indentation by refining the Oliver and Pharr nanoindentation processing and calibration procedure for AFM cantilever and tip. The introduced area-function calibration (AFC) method allows to considerably reduce these approximations and provides semi-quantitative measurements. No prior knowledge of the tip shape and cantilever stiffness are required and viscoplasticity is investigated through a qualitative index. Indentation parameters variations are shown to impact the resulting measurements, i.e., indentation modulus, viscoplasticity index, adhesion force and energy. AFC method, applied to map regions of tension wood, provides very stable mechanical parameters characteristic of each region, which makes this method of high interest for plant cell wall studies.