Novel Method for Evaluating Three-Dimensional Surface Roughness Based on Grey Relational Analysis

Abstract

Abstract Evaluation of surface roughness is of great importance in the manufacturing industry, as the surface roughness of a workpiece affects its surface quality considerably as well as its function. 3D surface roughness can reflect the microtopography of the surface profile more comprehensively than 2D parameters can. In 3D surface roughness evaluation, finding an appropriate reference surface is of the utmost importance. In this article, a grey reference surface obtained by grey self-adaptive weighted mean-filtering based on grey relational analysis is proposed to evaluate 3D surface roughness. The primary sampling data of the measured surface need not obey typical distributions, so surface profile can be evaluated with fewer data. Using sample analysis, the grey reference surface is well consistent with the Gaussian reference surface, showing a maximum relative error of merely 0.05 % between the former and the latter. Their evaluation results for surface roughness are in agreement. A grey reference surface can be used as one of the complements of a Gaussian reference surface.