Scale-invariant analysis of wear particle morphology—a preliminary study

The importance of wear particle characterization is continuously growing, as the need for prediction and monitoring of wear increases. Accurate analysis of wear particles can, however, be limited by problems associated with particle characterization, especially of the wear particlesʹ surface morphology. Since the shape and surface topography of wear particles often exhibit a fractal nature, fractal (scale-invariant) methods are, therefore, used in their characterization. However, the methods used to date ignore the fact that all fractal objects can be described by a small set of mathematical rules; although finding those rules which describe a particular fractal image is a difficult problem. No general solution exists to date and this paper attempts to redress this problem. A new analysis method, ‘scale-invariant analysis’, which is based on a partitioned iterated function system (PIFS), is proposed for the characterization of wear particle morphology. PIFS is a collection of contractive affine transformations. Each affine transformation transforms one part of a wear particle image onto another part of the same image. PIFSs were constructed for both computer generated and SEM images of wear particles. Results obtained in this study clearly demonstrate that the morphology of wear particles can effectively be characterized using the PIFS method.