Back to the envelope system with morphological operations for the evaluation of surfaces

Common functional requirements of work pieces are sliding, adhering, sealing and assembling. These requirements are asking for specific properties of surfaces. Surfaces of work pieces are described by geometrical properties such as dimension, orientation, form, waviness and roughness. Functional requirements need to be expressed by specifying these geometrical features. With the existing definitions for orientation, form, waviness and roughness a holistic description of functional surface properties is not possible. Based on the function a holistic view of the surface properties including dimension, orientation, form, waviness and roughness is necessary. The existing classification of the surface based on wavelength is in combination with the mean line filtering an incomplete definition. The dimension and orientation of the work piece geometry is not even considered. With the revitalization of the envelope system there is a new approach to establish a correlation between the functional requirements and geometrical properties of the work piece surface. This new approach consists of the implementation of morphological filter operations to associate dimension, orientation, form, waviness and roughness based on a common reference system. This common reference system is equal to the envelope of the work piece. Proposals to describe the functional requirements with new parameters are presented. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.