3D Optical Microscopy for Automotive and Aerospace

3D optical image showing defect in chrome plating.

Understanding surface wear and its underlying causes is critical to the manufacture and maintenance of automotive and aerospace parts, such as bearings, seals, drive trains, shafts, brake components, and much more. Wear is extremely difficult to quantify—no single number can adequately describe how much a surface has worn, or to what degree this wear will affect performance. The advanced surface metrology and imaging capabilities of the Contour Elite™ 3D optical microscopes give engineers the ability to better understand wear and correlate wear to a particular manufacturing process or wear mechanism.

Contour Elite can characterize areas more accurately and in greater detail, and larger areas can be measured more easily because the system has the ability to "stitch" multiple measurements into one larger dataset. The systems also can highlight data trends such as waviness or lay, as well as features such as a predominance of ridges or scratches.

3D optical microscopy image reveals wear on a cylinder wall.

3D surface analysis of a brake rotor.

Shafts, mating or connecting surfaces, and close-tolerance or irregularly-shaped parts present special measurement challenges. Contour Elite addresses these issues, providing the ability to measure difficult areas, such as shaft interiors, quantitatively and repeatably, with complete accuracy. Custom investigation of surface data provides thousands of different analysis parameters for a wide range of metrology needs. Plus, Contour Elite’s high-fidelity grayscale and color imaging, combined with exclusive side illumination and advanced algorithms, allows users to collect accurate metrology data with corresponding surface images for complete surface characterization.