An Approach for the Transfer of Real Surfaces in Finite Element Simulations

Virtual simulations are a relevant element in product engineering processes and facilitate engineers to test different concepts during early phases of the development. However, in tribological product engineering, simulations are hardly used because input data such as material behavior are often missing. Besides the material behavior, the surface roughness of the contacting elements is relevant for tribological systems. To expand the capabilities of the virtual engineering of tribological components such as bearings or brakes, the hereby presented approach allows for the depiction of real rough surfaces in finite element simulations. Rough surfaces are scanned by a white-light interferometer (WLI) and further processed by removing the outliers and replacing non-measured samples. Next, a spline generation creates a solid body, which is imported to CAD software and afterwards meshed with triangle and quadrilateral elements in different sizes. The results comprise the evaluation of six differently manufactured (turned, coated, and pressed) real surfaces. The surfaces are compared by the deviations of the roughness values after measuring with the WLI and after meshing them. Furthermore, the elements’ aspect ratios and skewness describe the mesh quality. The results show that the transfer is dependent upon deep cliffs and large Sz values in comparison to the lateral expansion.