To measure surface texture accurately we need to be able to separate it from the underlying shape. Most surface texture software can remove simple shapes such as tilt and cylinder. Complex surface shape, however, can prove difficult to handle in a lot of software. OmniSurf3D includes a number of flexible tools to handle complex shape. … Read more
QMP Racing’s Brad Lagman tells us how. There’s information about your performance and machining processes hiding in your surface texture. But you need to be able to see it to improve it. No one knows this better than Brad Lagman, founder of QMP Racing Engines in Chatsworth, California. Lagman has been building engines for drag … Read more
Some 2D (profile) parameters are closely related to their 3D (areal) equivalents. For example, Ra and Sa (2D and 3D average roughness), and Rq and Sq (2D and 3D root mean square roughness) are calculated in similar manners and often produce similar values. Rz, another commonly used 2D parameter, however, does not generally correlate with … Read more
Our new Surface Library is a collection of data that will help you to explore, understand, and explain surface texture. It contains some of the more useful and interesting data we’ve collected over the years. Some datasets highlight common surfaces. Others help show how a particular analysis affect data. And some are…well, just fun.
For years labs and factories have been attempting to go paperless, eliminating hard copy documents in favor of digital storage. The benefits are compelling, from an environmental perspective as well as for data accessibility. In many cases, however, “paperless” simply means storing documents as PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files or as bitmap images—exchanging one static format … Read more
Controlling flatness is critical for many surfaces. Functions such as sealing and load distribution are directly related to surface flatness. While controlling overall flatness is important, it may only be part of the answer. A gasket sealing with a head deck, for example, may tolerate a large amount of overall flatness variation…yet it may still … Read more