WPI’s Surface Metrology Research Laboratory

To advance Surface Metrology in both academia and industry by discovering and disseminating new knowledge.

WPI’s Surface Metrology Laboratory was founded over 25 years ago by Professor Christopher Brown. We develop and disseminate methods for learning how to distinguish surface topographies, and how they influence performance and are influenced by processing. These are applied to many fields in science, engineering, art, and conservation.

We have developed several multiscale geometric analyses and characterization techniques. Using these, we have discovered strong correlations with processing and performance, and confident discriminations of surfaces that perform or were processed differently. We have developed, patented, and standardized several new multiscale geometric characterization parameters, including length, area, and volume, and are currently working on curvature. We have found strong functional correlations with topographies, notably friction, adhesion, fatigue limit, and wetting.

The lab has participated in research in a broad range of applications, including food science, pavement, sports engineering, tribology and manufacturing, as well as physical anthropology, archaeology, and forensics. The lab participates in standards work with ASTM, ASME, and ISO. The lab’s work appears in over one hundred publications and has been cited in hundreds of others. WPI’s Surface Metrology Laboratory was founded over 25 years ago by Professor Christopher Brown. We develop and disseminate methods for learning how to distinguish surface topographies, and how they influence performance and are influenced by processing. These are applied to many fields in science, engineering, art, and conservation.

Surface Metrology?

Surface metrology is studying measurement, analysis, and characterization of surface topographies, or textures, including roughness. It is important in a wide variety of fields and situations including adhesion, biological growth, catalysis, corrosion, cleanability, friction, fracture, flow, forensics, geography, heat transfer, mass transfer, oceanography, scattering, wear, and wetting. These impact practically all engineering disciplines and many sciences. they include scales from nanometers to kilometers.

Our Facilities

We are fortunate to have use of a GelSight, a Mahr Federal stylus profiler, and state-of-the-art software from Digital Surf for analyzing and characterizing topographies. The lab is located on the WPI main campus in 243 Washburn Building.