On discovering relevant scales in surface roughness measurement--an evaluation of a band-pass method.

When characterizing surfaces and searching for correlations to functional properties, such as friction, finding the right scale of roughness for evaluation can improve correlations. However, in traditional roughness parameter analysis, a wide range of scales, or all scales of topography in the surface roughness measurements are evaluated together. In this study a multi-scale method using a series of band-pass filters is employed for finding scales of topography with strong correlations to friction.