FRACTAL GEOMETRY APPLIED TO ONLINE MONITORING OF SURFACE FINISH

The surface finish of machined parts determines the functionality of t he product and also the machining requirements for making the parts. O n-line monitoring of the surface finish has been an active area of mac hining research, Conventional contact techniques used for surface-fini sh measurement are not suitable for in-process measurement as they int erfere with the machining operation. In this research, the principle o f fractal geometry and image-processing techniques are used to impleme nt a practical area-based surface-finish monitoring system. The fracta l dimension estimated from the captured image is used successfully to characterize the machined surface. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science