Abstract
Areal surface texture analysis is becoming widespread across a diverse range of applications, from engineering to ecology. In many studies silicon based impression media are used to replicate surfaces, and the fidelity of replication defines the quality of data collected. However, while different investigators have used different impression media, the fidelity of surface replication has not been subjected to quantitative analysis based on areal texture data. Here we present the results of an analysis of the accuracy and precision with which different silicon based impression media of varying composition and viscosity replicate rough and smooth surfaces. Both accuracy and precision vary greatly between different media. High viscosity media tested show very low accuracy and precision, and most other compounds showed either the same pattern, or low accuracy and high precision, or low precision and high accuracy. Of the media tested, mid viscosity President Jet Regular Body and low viscosity President Jet Light Body (Coltène Whaledent) are the only compounds to show high levels of accuracy and precision on both surface types. Our results show that data acquired from different impression media are not comparable, supporting calls for greater standardisation of methods in areal texture analysis.
Highlights
Analysis and quantification of natural and manufactured surfaces at micrometric and sub-micrometric scales is becoming widespread
The opposite is true for high viscosity media (Microset 101RF and MM240TV)
Microset 101RF displays the highest variability on the smooth surface between results recorded using each of the methods for scale limiting surfaces, varying between two significant differences when using a 2nd order of polynomial and a spline filter, and seven significant differences when using a 5th order of polynomial and a robust Gaussian filter
Summary
Analysis and quantification of natural and manufactured surfaces at micrometric and sub-micrometric scales is becoming widespread. Rather than direct analysis of a surface, replicas are used Often this is for methodological reasons: some samples cannot be transported to the analytical facility, and some are too large to be accommodated by the measuring instruments; some types of surface are prone to movement during measurement (e.g. in vivo skin measurements); the properties of some surfaces (e.g. highly transparent or highly reflective) are unsuited for data collection using certain instruments. Investigations into the precision and accuracy of impression media used are important, but only a few such studies have been conducted[5,9,10,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32], and none have undertaken systematic, statistical comparisons of areal textural parameters acquired from sub-micrometre resolution replicas, produced using a range of impression media with different properties. None of these studies quantified the variation in resulting surfaces
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