Acoustic Emission Monitoring of AFM Nano Scratching for ductile and brittle materials

An atomic force microscope (AFM) with suitable tips has been used for nano fabrication/nanometric machining purposes. In this paper, acoustic emission (AE) was introduced to monitor AFM machining of both a brittle material (silicon) and a ductile material (copper). With a specially designed experimental setup, AE responses were sampled, under various cutting conditions including ramped load to investigate machining characteristics for cutting depth changes. By analyzing the experimental results, it can be concluded that measured AE energy is sensitive enough to detect the changes in the mechanism of material removal including the ductile-brittle transition during nanometric machining