Industrial Finishes of Ceramic Surfaces at the Micro-level and its Influence on Strength

The mechanical properties of ceramic materials are influenced by surface finishing procedures. This paper presents a brief introduction to an advanced methodology of digital moiré contouring utilized to get surface information in the micro-range that is a generalization of a method developed for metallic surfaces [1]. Five types of surface treatments are considered. Two of the finishes utilize diamond grinding with a rough grit (100) and a smoother grit (800). The third type is laser assisted machining of the ceramic. The fourth type is simply applying the laser without machining. The final type is the as received ceramic resulting from the process of fabrication. A total of 63 specimens, nine of each kind were tested in four-point-bending. The strength of the specimens was statistically analyzed using the Gaussian and the Weibull distributions. The statistical strength values are correlated with the statistical distributions of surface properties obtained using this advanced digital moiré contouring method. The paper illustrates the practical application of this method that was developed to analyze surfaces at micro level and beyond.