Open Access

ARTICLE

Profile Analysis of Regularly Microstructured Surfaces

H. Payer¹, T. Haschke¹, R. Reichardt¹, G. Li², K. Graf^2,3, W. Wiechert^1,3

1 University of Siegen, Department of Simulation, Siegen,Germany
2 Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research, Polymer Physics Group, Mainz, Germany
3 Correspondingauthors: wolfgang.wiechert@unisiegen.de(simulations); grafk@mpip-mainz.mpg.de(experiments)

Fluid Dynamics & Materials Processing 2008, 4(2), 61-76. https://doi.org/10.3970/fdmp.2008.004.061

Abstract

Microstructured surfaces are of steadily increasing importance in a large variety of technological applications. For the purpose of quality assurance, e.g. during variation studies of experimental parameters or for comparison with results from simulations, the surface geometry must be precisely measured and described in terms of geometric parameters. An analysis tool for regularly structured surfaces is presented that performs a highly automated evaluation of surface scanning data and derives geometric quality control parameters. To demonstrate the power of the analysis tool it is exemplarily applied for the investigation of microcraters emerging after the evaporation of micrometer-sized toluene droplets on a polystyrene substrate. The shape of the craters is described by a mathematical model under the assumption of rotational or elliptic symmetry. The ideal geometry generated from this model is called a synthetic surface. Mismatch between the synthetic and the experimentally determined surface morphology is then minimized by means of a full least squares fitting. In order to characterize the crater profile global geometrical parameters are derived and used for an automated statistical analysis subsequent to the fitting procedure. An evaluation example is presented for two sets of 20 microcraters each and the reproducibility of the shapes of the craters is discussed.

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Keywords

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