Digital Metrology Notepad Series Surface Texture and Wear

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. But that’s what often happens when people asses wear at the surface texture level: they measure a parameter like Ra (average roughness) before and after wear, then say that the difference in Ra is the amount that the surface has worn.
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, both micro wear (the kind within the surface texture) and macro wear (the larger scale depth of the wear scar, or the hole in your yard!)