Multiscale analysis of abrasion damage on stainless steel

摘要

Topography is a surface characteristic which is as important as the chemical composition with regard to its functional properties. Topography can be mainly described by three kinds of roughness parameters: amplitude, frequency and hybrid parameters. The present study aims to perform a multiscale morphological analysis of 316L austenitic stainless steel ground surfaces with 11 different paper grades. It is shown that the values of the most commonly used roughness parameters R_a (average arithmetic roughness) and R_t (peak to valley) depend on the observation scale with values distributed into three characteristic stages. At small observation scales, less than approx 5 mu m, the abraded surfaces are not characterised by any particular scaling law. At large observation scales, more than approx 60 mu m, the evolution of the roughness parameters indicates that the abrasion mechanism follows an homothetic scaling law for the different paper grades. These two extreme stages are separated by a transition stage that can be characterised by an index, which exhibits an increasing linear evolution with the size of the abrasive grains.