As per ISO376 : 2011, creep uncertainty can be measured directly or indirectly. In this regard, this paper seeks to provide a comparison between direct and indirect creeps computed from hysteresis. All computations for direct and indirect creeps were done using equations from ISO376 : 2011. Five force measuring devices were experimentally examined for this purpose. Results showed that the behaviors of direct and indirect creeps were quite different. The relative creep that was directly measured was constant. On the other hand, the relative creep that was indirectly estimated varied with the applying force. Therefore, the directly measured creep cannot be replaced by the indirect one. This paper proposes a method to use a representative value for indirect creep, as the maximum of the creep. For the force measuring devices that had good hysteresis characteristics, the directly and indirectly measured creeps were comparable. However, for the force measuring devices with poor hysteresis characteristics, the indirectly estimated creep was much higher than the directly measured creep. Therefore, it is highly recommended to measure the creep directly for the force measuring devices characterized by poor hysteresis.

This paper presents a high-performance flexible tactile sensor based on inorganic silicon flexible electronics. We created 100 nm-thick semiconducting silicon ribbons equally distributed with 1mm spacing and 8×8 arrays to sense the pressure distribution with high-sensitivity and repeatability. The organic silicon rubber substrate was used as a spring material to achieve both of mechanical flexibility and robustness. A thin copper layer was deposited and patterned on top of the pressure sensing layer to create a flexible temperature sensing layer. The fabricated tactile sensor was tested through a series of experiments. The results showed that the tactile sensor is capable of measuring pressure and temperature simultaneously and independently with high precision.

Calibration of the spring constants of atomic force microscopy (AFM) cantilevers is one of the issues in biomechanics and nanomechanics for quantified force metrology at pico- or nano Newton level. In this paper, we present an AFM cantilever calibration system: the Nano Force Calibrator (NFC), which consists of a precision balance and a one-dimensional stage. Three types of AFM cantilevers (contact and tapping mode) with different shapes (beam and V) and spring constants (42, 1,0.06 N m') are investigated using the NFC. The calibration results show that the NFC can calibrate the micro cantilevers ranging from 0.01 - 100 N rn" with relative uncertainties ofless than 2%.