Design and fabrication of a low-cost teaching atomic force microscope with 3D printed parts

Over the past decade, additive manufacturing and three-dimensional (3D) printing have had a profound impact on manufacturing. With the emergence of affordable 3D printers, rapid prototyping has been quite accessible to researchers in academic and industrial laboratories. As a consequence, the number of laboratory instruments that have been assembled with 3D printed parts has risen. We present an atomic force microscope (AFM) constructed with as many 3D printed parts as the design would permit. Due to its simplicity, the proposed AFM is suitable for assembly by undergraduate students in a project-based laboratory course setting. The images of compact disc (CD) data tracks and standard samples obtained using the proposed low-cost AFM effectively demonstrate its nanoscale imaging capability.