Improving the Imaging Speed of an Atomic Force Microscope

Improving the Imaging Speed of an Atomic Force Microscope: A simulation study

Patil, O Patil (TU Delft Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering)

Verhaegen, Michel (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Mechanical Engineering | Systems and Control

2019-07-04

The Atomic Force Microscope is a type of high-resolution Scanning Probe Microscope where the image resolution has been demonstrated to be 3 orders of magnitude better than the optical diffraction limit. Directly observing individual protein molecules in action at high spatio-temporal resolutions has long been a holy grail for biological science. High-Speed Atomic Force Microscopy allows us to directly visualize the structural dynamics and dynamic processes of biological molecules in physiological solutions, at sub-second to sub-100-ms temporal resolutions, without disturbing their function. This has been demonstrated, where dynamically acting molecules such as Myosin V walking on an Actin filament and Bacteriorhodopsin in response to light were successfully visualized. Despite this remarkable progress, there are still many biomolecules whose structure is still not elucidated due limitations in scanning speed.The goal of this thesis is to investigate control techniques namely Q-Control and Direct Tip-sample Force estimation in a simulation environment developed over the course of this thesis to see if they can be used to improve the imaging speed of an AFM. A next step towards implementing these controllers on aField-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is also made, where a Fixed-Point implementationof the controller is realized and simulated in a FPGA simulation environment

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:e55c5db0-438f-4759-bcf9-7b3478a0b1d7

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 O Patil Patil