Exploring Surface Texture Quantification in Piezo Vibration Striking Treatment (PVST) Using Topological Measures

Abstract Surface texture influences wear and tribological properties of manufactured parts, and it plays a critical role in end-user products. Therefore, quantifying the order or structure of a manufactured surface provides important information on the quality and life expectancy of the product. Although texture can be intentionally introduced to enhance aesthetics or to satisfy a design function, sometimes it is an inevitable byproduct of surface treatment processes such as Piezo Vibration Striking Treatment (PVST). Measures of order for surfaces have been characterized using statistical, spectral, and geometric approaches. For nearly hexagonal lattices, topological tools have also been used to measure the surface order. This paper explores utilizing tools from Topological Data Analysis for measuring surface texture. We compute measures of order based on optical digital microscope images of surfaces treated using PVST. These measures are applied to the grid obtained from estimating the centers of tool impacts, and they quantify the grid’s deviations from the nominal one. Our results show that TDA provides a convenient framework for characterization of pattern type that bypasses some limitations of existing tools such as difficult manual processing of the data and the need for an expert user to analyze and interpret the surface images.