Abstract
A surface may be defined as the boundary that separates an object from the surrounding medium (ANSI/ASME B46.1, 1985; ISO 4287, 1996). Topography, as used in this book, refers to the description of the surface (and is used interchangeably with microtopography1 because of the small size of the areas used in the assessment). The science of surface topography analysis is primarily concerned with describing a surface in terms of its features. Then the knowledge gained about the geometry of the surface is used to control the surface production process and / or to predict the performance of the component in its functional environment.
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References
Not everyone agrees with the validity of this classification. Some researchers, for example, Scott (1986) have called for a radical re-think of this classification and indeed of the measurement approach.
Waviness tends to be more functionally significant in some applications and hence the designed surface condition would be waviness, with roughness being a secondary undesired component.
For this reason, O’Connor (1990) suggested that a detailed examination of waviness pattern during component manufacture can give an indication of process malfunction or deterioration.
Surfaces can also be classified into isotropic (uniform in character) or anisotropic (possessing lay or directionality).
The ability to resolve a surface into smaller and smaller (or larger and larger) scales has caused many workers, mainly beginning with Mandelbrot (1977) and Sayles and Thomas (1978) to suggest that fractal characterization might offer the best method of describing engineering surfaces.
Nicolau was a General in the French army and was unable to complete work on his prototype due to the outbreak of the second world war in 1939.
This is a limited classification only. See Chapter 3 for a more comprehensive treatment of techniques.
Even more confusing is the fact that some of the parameters used the same symbol but were defined in completely different manners in different standards; e.g. Rz is defined differently in DIN 4768 and ISO 4287/1 (see Dong, Mainsah and Stout, 1994).
M is the number of data points in the x direction, N is the number of data points in the y direction.
M system is the measurement system based on mean line references — for a detailed description of the M- and E-systems, see Shunmugam (1987).
This is the basis of the E system for measuring roughness of waviness.
The 10-point height parameter as defined by ISO emphasizes the extreme values in the whole assessment (i.e. the five highest and lowest in the whole surface) whilst that in DIN (usually known as the maximum depth parameter) is calculated using the highest and lowest values from 5 different sampling lengths. In the same measurement, ISO R z tends to be larger than DIN z .
For a more comprehensive treatment of surface parameters, the reader is referred to Whitehouse, 1994.
We here use the common, but not universal, notation as a way of emphasizing that the spectra must decay with frequency (i.e. the slope is necessarily negative).
The usual symbol for topothesy is now A and is used in other sections of this book.
Strictly, the point corresponding to that at which the slope of the power spectrum changed.
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Mainsah, E., Stout, K.J., Thomas, T.R. (2001). Surface measurement and characterization. In: Mainsah, E., Greenwood, J.A., Chetwynd, D.G. (eds) Metrology and Properties of Engineering Surfaces. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3369-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-3369-3_1
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