3D Morphological Analysis and Synthesis of Industrial Materials Surfaces

We present the original results pertaining to understanding topographical features on real industrial alloy surfaces. Quite often, such materials are subjected to different thermomechanical treatments with the goal of improving their yield strength, ductility, corrosion resistance, and other properties. Operations of casting, rolling, extruding, and stretching metal invariably leave their distinct “signatures” on the processed materials’ surfaces. It is highly desirable to be able to perform their characterization not in terms of the numerous surface roughness and/or waviness parameters, but rather in terms of the distinctive contributions of such operations. Indeed, if such a quantitative characterization were possible, it would be much easier to introduce corrective actions into the appropriate chain of production operations. We provide such possibility with the “morphological analysis and synthesis” techniques described in the paper. The results can be quantified either using surface topography measurements or studying light scattering from such surfaces. This last capability also gives a quick check of the “morphological similarity” of the “real” and modeled surfaces (images), which is important, e.g., in phase-field simulations. All calculations were performed using the MorphoHawk© software developed by the author and colleagues.