Recent trends in surface metrology

This paper describes future trends in surface metrology. Measurement techniques are briefly mentioned. A special attention was paid to tactile and optical methods. Selected problems of surface topography characterization are described. The effects of sampling and filtering on surface topography representation are analysed. Structured surfaces are becoming both technologically and economically critical. Therefore their description is a problem of a great practical importance. Multi-process textures are very important from functional point of view. Various methods of their description are compared. Surface texturing as a means for enhancing tribological properties of frictional pairs started to be extremely popular from for about last 10 years. The effects of surface texturing on improving tribological properties of sliding assemblies are analysed. The other influences of surface topography are mentioned in this paper.