Multi-scale representation of tribological surfaces

Many numerical surface topography analysis methods exist today. However, even for the moderately complicated topography of a tribological surface these methods can provide only limited information. The reason is that tribological surfaces often exhibit a non-stationary and multi-scale nature while the numerical methods currently used work well with surface data exhibiting a stationary random process and provide surface descriptors closely related to a scale at which surface data were acquired. The suitability of different methods, including Fourier transform, windowed Fourier transform, Cohen's class distributions (especially the Wigner-Ville distribution), wavelet transform, fractal methods and a hybrid fractal-wavelet method, for the analysis of tribological surface topographies is investigated in this paper. The method best suited to this purpose has been selected.