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Introduction:Surface finish, by definition, is the allowable deviation from a perfectly flat surface that is made by some manufacturing process.

Whenever any process is used to manufacture a part, there will be some roughness on the surface. This roughness can be caused by a cutting tool making tiny grooves on the surface or by the individual grains of the grinding wheel each cutting its own groove on the surface. It is affected by the choice of tool, speed of the tool, environmental conditions, and definitely by what material you are working with. Even when there is no machining involved, as in casting/injection molding, the surface of the mold will have surface deviation, which in turn will be transferred onto the part. Even if you could create a mold which was

Surface Finish Tester

Perfectly flat, the cooling process and thermal properties of the material would cause surface imperfections. So, like everything else in the manufacturing world, we have had to make a compromise between function and cost of manufacturing. If you dont need a mirror finish all over the brake drum, then you just cast it and worry about machining the surfaces that need to be (relatively) flat for the function of the part. I have included at the end of the report a chart that details the surface finishes that can be obtained by many different processing methods.

Surface texture is generally broken up into three components upon analysis: roughness, waviness, and form. Roughness is generally the marks made on a surface by the machining tool. e.g. grooves from the tool or from each grinding granule on a grinding wheel. Waviness is the result of the distance between the cutting tool and the workpiece changing. This is caused by vibration in the tool, a class of students walking by the machine, etc. Vibration can also be inside the tool; from the power motor, or from a worn spindle. If you assume that the part is straight and flat, form errors are because the machine tool's ways are not straight or are worn. This will create surface irregularities, but will do so in a consistant manner, because the machine will always follow the same path along its ways.

All three surface finish components exist simultaneously. They just overlap one another. We often will want to look at each (roughness, waviness, and form) separately, so we make the assumption (a correct one, in most cases) that roughness has a shorter wavelength than waviness, which in turn has a shorter wavelength than form.

When analyzing surface finish, there are more than 100 different parameters in existence (in recognized standards) and many more that have been developed for special products/circumstances. Many of these are either unneeded or just plain unnecessary. I am going to examine in some depth Ra and the different forms of Rz in use today, and touch on some others, as they have their own usefulness. The parameter most used in North America for general surface roughness is Ra. It measures average roughness by comparing all the peaks and valley to the mean line, and then averaging them all over the entire cutoff length. (Cutoff length is the length that the stylus is dragged across the surface; a longer cutoff length will give a more average value, and a shorter cutoff length might give a less accurate result over a shorter stretch of surface) Its also referred to as CLA (center line average) and AA (area average). The old name for the specification is RHR. In the picture below, the

Ra can fall between 10 and 20in. Benefits to using the Ra method are its simplicity and its widespread use.

However, Ra is a simple method of analyzing the profile, and it doesnt tell you everything about a surface. The three surfaces below will all display the same Ra value, but as you can see, they are quite different surfaces.

So if Ra doesnt give a detailed enough picture of the surface finish of a part, we need to use a different parameter. Another parameter that can be useful is Rymax. This is an ISO standard that measures the distance between the highest peak and the lowest valley over a cutoff length. This is a sensitive method of interpreting the data, and if over the measurement length a scratch or imperfection was encounter, you would get an extremely high reading. It was previously called just Rmax. An old form of measuring is by using a parameter called Rq. For Rq, you take the profile and turn it into a pure sine wave. Integrating the area under the curve can get the mean deviation from the mean line, and calculate the surface roughness. But because the profile of a surface will NEVER look like a sine wave, this approximation has been almost completely replaced by more accurate means of analyzing and reporting the data.

The parameter most widely used in Europe is Rz, or mean roughness depth. The Rz ISO standard is also called Ten Point Average Roughness. It averages the height of the five highest peaks and the depth of the five lowest valleys over the measuring length, using an unfiltered profile. The Rz DIN standard (a German standard) averages the highest point and lowest point over five cutoffs. The newer Japanese standard (JIS) measures the same points, but filters (slightly smooth) the raw data before creating a profile. There is also a different method of interpreting the same data, in a parameter called R3zi. It takes the third highest peak and the third highest valley over one sample length. There are many more parameters and evaluation methods for surface finish. Some are quite specialized for a small number of applications. One company manufactures tubing for process (neutral) gasses for the manufacture of microchips and microprocessors. The smallest imperfections on the inside of the tube can cause a buildup of contaminants, and these in turn can be picked up by the inert gas. They have developed new parameters RaCH: continually shifts the mean point and identifies the largest Ra over the entire length. RaCL: the same, but identifies the smallest Ra over the length. RaCA: continually averages the Ra values over the cutoff length. These parameters havent been adopted by any governing standards body, but have been accepted as a standard within that industry. Other parameters, such as skew ness, kurtosis, core roughness depth, Swedish height, etc. go into much more depth in analyzing the profile. Some of these are used in optical applications where the angle of the wave entering the surface will be refracted/reflected differently based on the angle of the profile bumps. Surface finish may be denoted by a roughness grade number. Here is a table that specifies the Ra values for roughness grade numbers. (ISO standard 1992)

Roughness values Ra m 50 25 12.5 6.3 3.2 in 2000 1000 500 250 125

Roughness Grade Numbers N12 N11 N10 N9 N8

1.6 0.8 0.4 0.2 0.1 0.05 0.025

63 32 16 8 4 2 1

N7 N6 N5 N4 N3 N2 N1 VALUES OF ROUGHNESS

There are hundreds of different styles of 2-D surface testers, but they all essentially do the same thing. Stylus tips are the same as on most precision measuring equipment, being a very hard stone usually. The stylus on the Mitutoyo Surftest 211 (the tester in the shop) is diamond tipped. This is to prevent deflection of the tip when it encounters the tiny bumps on the surface. The stylus tip can have a different radius depending on the application and how you plan to analyze the data. The radius on the diamond tip on the Mitutoyo tester is 5m. The downward force of the stylus when measuring is 4 Mn. While something of this nature may be good for most circumstances, if you are testing the surface of a soft material like gold, you might be scratching the surface with your surface tester. The customer will probably fail to see the irony in that, so different methods of testing must be used. There are optical and other non-contact methods of measuring surface quality, but are generally very expensive (starting above $10,000). Surface testers generally are calibrated before being used (and periodically thereafter) because the tester amplifies the signal. Its reading is compared to a known value, and adjusted until the tester displays the same reading as the reference specimen. Amplitude Parameters:Amplitude parameters characterize the surface based on the vertical deviations of the roughness profile from the mean line. Many of them are closely related to the parameters found in statistics for characterizing population samples. For example, Ra is the arithmetic average of the absolute values and Rt is the range of the collected roughness data points. The average roughness, Ra, is expressed in units of height. In the Imperial (English) system, 1 Ra is typically expressed in millionths of an inch. This is also referred to as microinches or sometimes just as micro (however the latter is just slang). The amplitude parameters are by far the most common surface roughness parameters found in the United States on mechanical engineering drawings and in

technical literature. Part of the reason for their popularity is that they are straightforward to calculate using a digital computer. Parame ter Ra, Raa, Ryni Rq, RRMS[1] Rv Rp Rt Rsk Rku RZdin, Rtm Description arithmetic average of absolute values root mean squared maximum valley depth maximum peak height Maximum Height of the Profile skewness kurtosis average distance between the highest peak and lowest valley in each sampling length, ASME Y14.36M 1996 Surface Texture Symbols Japanese Industrial Standard for Rz, based on the five highest peaks and lowest valleys over the entire sampling length.

RZjis

LISTS OF PARAMETERS OF ROUGHNESS Practical effects In most cases, roughness is considered to be detrimental to part performance. As a consequence, most manufacturing prints establish an upper limit on roughness, but not a lower limit. An exception is in cylinder bores where oil is retained in the surface profile and a minimum roughness is required. Roughness is often closely related to the friction and wear properties of a surface. A surface with a large Ra value will usually have high friction and wear quickly. The peaks in the roughness profile are not always the points of contact. The form and waviness must also be considered.

values of different finishing

Inspection of PLV Housing Roughness:-

Drawing of PLV housing

Step1:- Calibrate the instrument with the help of standard.

Standard

Calibrate with standard Step2:- Set the depth of the probe at the safety side shown aside.

Step4:- Press the start button and it will start to measure the Surface finish.

Step5:- Find the reading and compare it with the standard Reading.

Depth of the probe

Ra reading

Snap of reading

Step6:- Once it is calibrated then take the sample of which Surface roughness is to be checked.

Step7:- Set up the housing as the standard was set.

Snap of checking part

Step8:- Observe the graph and the measure the reading as Shown.

Graph

Snap of graph

Observe d Reading

Snap of final reading

Step9: Our required reading was Ra less than 1.6um . We have observed Ra1.3um.

Step10:- As the reading is within tolerance the sample is ok.

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