news

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. We sat down with Brad, the larger-than-life personality who fuels QMP, to talk about how he and QMP mine surface texture for every ounce of performance from their engines.

How much of a surface do you need to measure in order to accurately describe its roughness? For typical surfaces, the standards suggest an evaluation length 5 times longer than the roughness cutoff. But if you are measuring a narrow feature or part, the entire surface may be smaller than that 5X length.

In this video we show you how to determine the "evaluation length" for measuring roughness on a typical surfaces, and we introduce options for measuring texture on smaller surfaces. We also point out some pitfalls that can lead to incorrect evaluation of roughness and waviness.

Digital Metrology's new Surface Library is a collection of data to help users explore, understand, and explain surface texture. The Library is intended for surface texture professionals, researchers, teachers, students, and anyone curious about surface texture. Over the years we have generated and collected thousands of surface datasets. Some datasets highlight common objects, some help show how a particular kind of analysis affects data. And some are...just fun.

Our joint article with Supfina, "Creating a World-Class Digital Workflow," is now in American Machinist magazine. This article discusses the benefits of keeping measurement data as an active part of the development process, rather than archiving it in static formats. OmniSurf software has been a key part of Supfina's effort to "go paperless" in a way that lets them reuse their data for future projects, without remeasuring. Find out how Supfina has done it!

If you dug a hole in your yard, you likely wouldn’t assess how deep it was by describing the roughness at the bottom of the hole. Yet that's what often happens when we assess wear at the surface texture level. In this video we look at why roughness is not a good gauge of wear, and we’ll show you some better ways to quantify wear.

When working with areal (3D) surface texture data, we often want to examine 2D slices through that data. OmniSurf3D takes XY analysis further than most other software. Small charts called “sparklines” help you to quickly spot trends in parameter values. Sparklines also show which parameters are most sensitive to the variations that occur in the particular surface. This video shows how the XY Profile Analysis in OmniSurf3D provides a unique twist on cross-section analysis that makes it easier for you to find, interpret, and address trends in your areal 3D datasets.

Is a 3D (areal) texture measurement “better” than a 2D (profile) measurement? There are strong opinions on both sides. But the truth is that there may be some common ground. In fact, there are cases in which each type of measurement may be the right choice. In this video we discuss the properties of 2D vs areal (3D) measurement systems. We talk about how the two are related and we show where one may be preferable over the other depending on the application.

Is a smaller stylus tip radius better for measuring roughness? Is a larger tip more durable?

In this video we discuss how the stylus tip radius influences what we see in surface texture measurement data. We discuss the short filter and how it provides consistency between measurement systems and stylus sizes.

We also look at a common misconception that a larger stylus tip radius is more durable than a smaller one. It's really not the case, and we will show you why.

3D datasets often include missing or errant pixels, which can typically be solved by applying a median filter, peak/valley thresholds, etc. But in some cases the errors are too big or too isolated to filter out. For these cases, the Surface Editor Tool, unique to OmniSurf3D, lets you selectively repair missing data and data errors interactively. Find out how it works—and how easy it is to clean up a dataset—in this video.

Are the peaks that you are seeing in your surface texture measurement real? In some cases the peaks in your graphs may not be real at all...they may be artifacts of the filtering operation. False peaks can make you think something's wrong, which can lead to unnecessary rework or even scrapping of good parts.

In this video we look at how the filtering process can sometimes lead to the generation of peaks that aren't there in reality. We also look at a better filter–the Robust Filter–that can provide more accurate representations of the roughness and waviness.