| Abstract: | European manufacturers have proposed a set of surface roughness parameters based on an examination of the variation in slope of the bearing ratio curve of a surface profile. It is shown, that the proposed procedure provides no useful information, and indeed is misleading, since the bearing ratio curve of even a normally-distributed random surface profile exhibits the expected variation in slope when plotted on rectangular coordinates. On the other hand, the desired information is readily obtained by a similar examination of the cumulative height distribution of a surface profile (the unity complement of the bearing ratio) when it is plotted on normal probability coordinates. |
