Development of Method for Measuring Minute Wear of Roughness Peaks of Underlying Steel Exposed on Soft Material-Covered Steel Surface

This paper reports a novel method to measure the very small amount of wear that occurred at roughness peaks of the underlying base steel exposed on the surface covered with a soft material film removed by sliding. It is impossible to detect the minute wear of the exposed roughness peaks by a known method so far. Image data with three-dimensional height information obtained by a laser microscope is used to detect the position and height of roughness peaks of the underlying base steel exposed on the surface. This method makes it possible to track the minute wear progress using the mean height of all the detected roughness peaks or the wear of detected specific roughness peaks. It was also reported that this method has generality to be applied to untreated steel surfaces. It was possible to detect tiny distinctions of wear by this method. Then it was clarified that the wear of steel exposed on the MnP-treated surface is greater than that of the untreated steel, especially it was remarkable in the initial stage of sliding.