A study on the monitoring of nano scale EHL film formation with ultra low aspect ratio

The measurement of ultra low aspect ratio fluid film thickness is very crucial technique both for the verification of lubrication media characteristics and for the clearance design in many precision components such as MEMS, precision bearings and other slideways. Many technologies are applied to the measurement of ultra low aspect ratio fluid film thickness (i.e. elastohydrodynamic lubrication film thickness). In particular, in-situ optical interferometric method has many advantages in making the actual contact behaviors realized with the experimental apparatus. This measurement method also does the monitoring of the surface defects and fractures happening during the contact behavior, which are delicately influenced by the surface conditions such as load, velocity, lubricant media as well as surface roughness. Careful selection of incident lights greatly enhances the fringe resolutions up to similar to 1.0 nanometer scale with digital image processing technology. In this work, it is found that coaxial aligning trichromatic incident light filtering system developed by the author can provide much finer resolution of ultra low aspect ratio fluid film thickness than monochromatic or dichromatic incident lights, because it has much more spectrums of color components to be discriminated according the variations of film thickness. For the measured interferometric images of ultra low aspect ratio fluid film thickness it is shown how the film thickness is finely digitalized and measured in nanometer scale with digital image processing technology and space layer method. The developed measurement system can make it possible to visualize the contact deformations and possible fractures of contacting surface under the repeated loading condition.