In this work, an attempt is made to develop a novel approach based on the concept of process signatures to investigate the correlation of the quality of manufactured surface and the process of its generation which is independent to manufacturing conditions. The process signature is the multiscale modifications of surface topography, which depicts the essential changes of the surface state produced on the original surface after abrasive machining. An advanced signal processing technique, the continuous wavelets transform is used to identify the multiscale transfer function of the process which represents the amount of surface modifications. The applicability of this methodology is demonstrated by several practical examples. It is shown that the signature is strongly influenced by abrasive dispersity and granulometry, process induced modes of deformation. The work demonstrates also that the process signatures respond in a predictable fashion to changes in process variables and combinations of stage.

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Controlling the part’s balance of crankshafts are important issues for automotive manufacturers. Unbalance measurement is usually carried out using high-precision mechanical machines. The main objective of the present work is to replace mechanical measuring systems by a non-contact digitizing system, which permits the acquisition of the crankshaft surface. As the geometry to be measured presents a large variety of shapes and textures with accessibility issues, the definition of the best-suited scanning system related to geometrical and industrial constraints is a major issue. In this direction, the paper deals with the definition of a protocol based on quality indicators associated to the collected data to compare various digitizing systems. Those quality indicators are assessed thanks to simple artifacts measurement according to a specific procedure. The comparison protocol is applied to evaluate three triangulation based digitizing systems: Results allow us to identify well-adapted digitizing systems in relation to crankshaft balancing requirements.