Multiscale analysis of abrasion damage on stainless steel

Abstract

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 ∼5 μm, the abraded surfaces are not characterised by any particular scaling law. At large observation scales, more than ∼60 μm, 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.