Use of atomic force microscopy for surface roughness determination of ball bearings

Abstract Since the development of microtechnology and nanotechnology, new analytical methods have been developed, and, among them, atomic force microscopy has been especially used for the characterization of the surface topography of a very wide range of materials on a submicrometer scale. A great advantage of this method is not only the possibility of imaging surfaces with unprecedented resolution but it also can perform quantitative evaluation of selected surface features, including statistical analysis of the corrugations, which permits the roughness parameters to be determined. Such measurements of the surface roughness were performed on small ball bearings and the results showed that the roughness data can be very different, even under the “grade 3”, i.e. the lowest surface roughness value given in the AFBMA standard.