Precise manipulation of metallic nanoparticles: Multiscale analysis

Fixed Interfacial Multiscale Method (FIMM) is proposed to study the manipulation of metallic nanoparticles. Nanomanufacturing processes need such manipulations with an accuracy of a few nanometers. A controlled nanopositioning setup is essential to reach the nanometric resolutions in nanomanufacturing processes. Present paper emphasizes on development of simulation times and length scales and solution of the invalidity problem of Continuum Mechanics (MC) approaches at small scales. The comparisons show the performance of presented approach. After comparisons, the effect of tip, substrate and probe materials have been investigated to find the best configuration for precise manipulation. Then a simple and effective path planning has been implemented to more accurately manipulate the nickel nanoparticles. The best plan resulted in 4.96% error with respect to the desired path, whereas it is about 50–100% in the case of other configurations and 10–60% in previous works. This good result has been achieved without any compensation, and no additional imaging are needed. At the end, some considerable results have been presented that can be implemented in real conditions to avoid high practical costs.