The use of areal surface topography characterisation in relation to fatigue performance

Although the effect of surface topography on fatigue life is widely accepted, the underlying role of surface roughness from first principles is still poorly understood. Currently approaches which consider the influence of surface roughness on fatigue life prediction can be broadly classified into surface corrector factors (C_s) and stress concentration factors (K_t). Those approaches describe the surface according to the manufacturing process (machined, grounded⋯), or using 2D height descriptor parameters (R_a, R_z⋯). However, these approaches are not able to correctly describe the effect of roughness on the fatigue performance where it is anticipated a richer set of surface descriptors would show correlation. The present work aims to highlight the inherent limitations of the most commonly employed 2D surface measurement and characterization techniques, and provides an insight into the application of 3D areal surface characterization processes including the use of the latest areal surface topography parameters quantifying amplitude, spatial, and hybrid topographical information which is considered to be important for fatigue performance correlation.