Performance, Characterization and Design of Textured Surfaces

In recent years the efforts to better control friction and wear have focused on surface-topography modification through surface texturing. Although a lot of effort, including experimental and analytical work, has been put into finding the optimal texturing parameters and design rules for reduced friction, optimization is still too often limited and based on a trial-and-error approach. Therefore, the aim of the present research work was to investigate the possibility of using kurtosis and skewness as the design parameters for selecting the optimal texturing pattern for contact surfaces operating under lubricated conditions. The results of this investigation performed on groove- and dimple-textured surfaces under low-load, low-sliding speed conditions confirmed the correlation between the kurtosis and skewness parameters and the coefficient of friction. For textured surfaces an increase in the kurtosis and a more negative skewness, obtained by reducing the cavity size, increasing the cavity depth and decreasing the texturing density, were found to yield a lower friction. Furthermore, kurtosis and skewness were recognized as suitable parameters for the optimization of textured surfaces.