Atomic force microscopy AFM is one of the most powerful techniques to probe surfaces and material properties at the nanoscale, and pattern organic and inorganic molecules. In all cases, knowledge of the tip geometry and its evolution with continued use is essential. In this work, a broadly applicable energy model for the evolution of scanning probe tip radii during use is presented based on qua...

Wear is one of the main factors that hinders the performance of probes for atomic force microscopy (AFM), including for the widely used amplitude modulation (AM-AFM) mode. Unfortunately, a comprehensive scientific understanding of nanoscale wear is lacking. We have developed a protocol for conducting consistent and quantitative AM-AFM wear experiments. The protocol involves controlling the tip-...

Diamond coatings made by processes such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD) have been increasingly explored for cutting tools applications, in particular, for machining lightweight high-strength materials. However, most literature to date reported that the wear resistance of CVD diamond tools is still distant to the polycrystalline diamond (PCD) counterparts. Recently, a microwave plasma-assiste...

PURPOSE To assess the relative efficacy of three types of controls in reducing respirable silica exposure during artificial stone countertop cutting with a handheld circular saw. APPROACH A handheld worm drive circular saw equipped with a diamond segmented blade was fitted with water supply to wet the blade as is typical. The normal wetted-blade condition was compared to (i) wetted-blade plus...

Given a simple (cuttable) polygon Q drawn on a piece of planar material R, we cut Q out of R by a (small) circular saw with a total number of cuts no more than twice the optimal. This improves the previous approximation ratio of 2.5 obtained by Demaine et al. in 2001.

A 16-station wear simulator of the pin-on-disc type, called RandomPOD, was designed, built, and validated. The primary area of application of the RandomPOD is wear studies of orthopaedic biomaterials. The type of relative motion between the bearing surfaces, generally illustrated as shapes of slide tracks, has been found to have a strong effect on the type and amount of wear produced. The compu...

To date most of the microelectromechanical system (MEMS) devices have been based on silicon. This is due to the technological know-how accumulated on the manipulation, machining and manufacturing of silicon. However, only very few devices involve moving parts. This is because of the rapid wear arising from high friction in these silicon-based systems. Recent tribometric experiments carried out ...

In this study, diamond films are deposited by using hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD), Nanocrystalline diamond (NCD) coated cemented tungsten carbide (WC-Co) milling tools are characterized, compared with microcrystalline diamond (MCD) and composite diamond coated ones, in terms of morphology with field emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM). Moreover, the diamond coated too...

The development of atomic force microscopy (AFM) has allowed wear mechanisms to be investigated at the nanometer scale by means of a single asperity contact generated by an AFM tip and an interacting surface. However, the low wear rate at the nanoscale and the thermal drift require fastidious quantitative measurements of the wear volume for determining wear laws. In this paper, we describe a ne...