Image Analysis Reliability in Tribological Surface Characterization

The study of the surface damage in Tribology has been performed by means of many different methods, mostly experimentally. Usually, the very first approach to a worn or damaged surface consists in analyzing it by means of profilometry, optical inspection, and SEM analysis. The visual inspection of the surface often bestows a complete and clear understanding of the prevalent wear mechanism, although not always such a qualitatively esteem can be quantified. Indeed, it is often rather difficult to build a significant numerical parameter that would be reliable to be adopted as a representative sign of a wear mechanism of interest. As far as surface characterization is concerned, for example, roughness analysis (average, highest peak, r.m.s.) offers the first parameters that can be conveniently adopted in most applications. However, in some applications, such as, for example, in the quantitative estimation of galling or in the characterization of damage under either mild or severe wear, they loose significance almost completely. The aim of the present investigation is, therefoe, detecting some reliable quantities that could be associated to correspondent wear mechanisms, within a certain degree of reliability. In this investigation, the parameters to be searched for will be selected among the ones defined by Image Analysis.