Inverse determination of the cutting force on nanoscale processing using atomic force microscopy

This study presents a means of calculating the cutting force during the nanomachining process using an atomic force microscope (AFM) cantilever. The determination of the cutting force in the machining system is regarded as an inverse vibration problem. The conjugate gradient method is applied to treat the inverse problem using available displacement measurements. Numerical results show that the method can accurately estimate the cutting force even for problems with error of displacement measurement. Furthermore, the initial guesses for the cutting force can be arbitrarily chosen and the computing time required for the inverse calculations takes less than one second using a Pentium III-450 MHz PC.