Participating Professors

Our professors who work in the Surface Metrology Laboratory

Professor Chris Brown:

Chris studied at the University of Vermont, writing a dissertation on chip formation during machining. Chris worked on engineering surfaces at Lausanne’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology until 1987. There he originated multiscale geometric texture analyses, with length-scale analyses and relative length characterization. He also began working on his discrete interaction model for topographically related phenomena. He worked on process and product innovations as a senior research engineer at Atlas Copco’s European research center, before joining the Mechanical Engineering faculty at WPI in 1989.

He founded WPI’s Surface Metrology Lab in 1991. With students he developed and patented area-scale analysis to calculate relative areas, another multiscale geometric characterization. He provided an experimental demonstration of discrete interaction in adhesion collaborating with EMPA, a Swiss lab. WPI’s lab currently has a Mahr stylus instrument, and a Sensofar S neox combined confocal, interferometric and focus variation measuring microscope, thanks to the kind generosity of their manufacturers. In collaborations around the world WPI measured and analyzed food, teeth, dinosaur footprints, archaeological artifacts, pavements, skin replicas, cutting tools, and many kinds of additive surfaces. Area-scale software developed at WPI and distributed around the world, was sold to Digital Surf in France who sells their own version of area-scale analysis and supplies WPI with their leading software.

Chris and Toby Bergstrom co-founded the International Conference on Surface Metrology at WPI. Brown first proposed principles for surface metrology in a keynote when the conference at the Natural History Museum in Hamburg in 2014. ICSM later merged with Met and Props, an older conference.

Chris has published over a hundred and fifty papers on surface metrology, Suh’s Axiomatic Design, manufacturing, and sports engineering. He has patents with many of his students on characterizing surface textures, friction testing, and sports equipment. His algorithms for topographic analyses are used worldwide in science and engineering research. He teaches WPI on-line grad courses on Surface Metrology and on Axiomatic Design several times a year, works on national and international standards for surface metrology, and provides tutorials for industry and conferences.