Characterisation of the tool wear during ductile polishing of ceramic tiles using morphological space

The present work is focused on the wear of the abrasive tools during the industrial polishing process of porcelain stoneware tiles, aiming to extend the validity of using morphological space to quantify the wear when very fine abrasive tools are used. In such morphological space, the horizontal and vertical axes are respectively the skewness (Sk) and the kurtosis (K) of the distribution of heights taken from several surface profiles. Despite the existence of an intrinsic interaction between Sk and K, the approach enables the sequence of geometrical changes suffered by the fickert surface to be quantitatively evaluated. The experimental points obtained were nearly aligned and with a negative slope, just as expected for abrasive wear. Implausibly, the results for fine abrasive fickerts was much more scattered than for those with coarse abrasive particles found in literature.