ISSUES IN MODELING MACHINED SURFACE TEXTURES

Abstract

This paper discusses the issues involved in modeling surface textures generated during machining and presents the potential of scale-sensitive fractal analysis in addressing these issues. Modeling surface texture creation supports the design machining processes for producing product surface textures with desired properties. The current understanding of how surface textures behave is largely incomplete. In order to understand how surface textures influence surface behavior, it is necessary to a) develop surface texture characterization methods with enough sophistication to capture the essence of the information inherent in the surface texture, and b) convey it so that the discovery of functionality, or behavior, of the texture is enabled. For a model of texture formation to be useful, the parameters that it calculates must be the same as the parameters that explain the texture behavior.