Fractal analysis of a new generation of HVOF sprayed coatings based on optical surface metrology

Abstract

Abstract In this article, fractal analysis combined with roughness measurement is proposed to characterize the new generations of HVOF sprayed coatings' surface textures. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional box counting algorithms are introduced to determine the fractal dimension, which is considered as a scale-invariant parameter and is able to describe chaos and complexity of the surface. For surface roughness metrology, a confocal laser scanning microscope with different lenses is used to acquire the areal topography, providing a sequence of height maps with different image resolutions. Typical areal roughness parameters are assessed based on the international standard ISO-25178. The results show that the fractal dimension is a powerful tool to depict the nature of the surface texture of the investigated coatings. Moreover, it is found that the traditional amplitude roughness parameters depend strongly on the range of the measurement field as well as the datasets' resolution, whereas the fractal dimension is rather invariant to the scales of the measured datasets. Finally, the correlation between the fractal dimension and roughness parameters is given at the end of this paper.