Tribology

Pelin Dogan, Bastien Meylan, Daniel Sage and Kilian Wasmer.

Dynamical Processes Group (EMPA) and Biomedical Image Group (EPFL) Switzerland.

Colour image reconstructed with the image from LED1 (shown in the middle) sent in the green channel and the negative of image from LED2 (shown on the right) sent into the red channel

Outline

This plugin presents an easy-to-use analysis tools to follow the evolution and/or changes of textured surfaces and/or surface topography recorded by a high magnification camera.

Reference

B. Meylan, P. Dogan, D. Sage, and K. Wasmer, A simple, fast and low-cost method for in situ monitoring of topographical changes and wear rate of a complex tribo-system under mixed lubrication, Wear, Vol. 364-365, pp. 22-30, 2016.

Tutorial

Tutorial in PDF.

Software

The software is a plugin running on ImageJ or Fiji. ImageJ is a general purpose image-processing package under public domain licence; it runs on several platforms: Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OSX.

Installation

Get a copy of ImageJ.
Download the plugin: Tribology_.jar.
Place the file Tribology_.jar in the "plugins" folder of ImageJ. That's it!

Main features

It allows the user to visualize and analyze the textured surfaces in various ways:

Display of the same location under different lightening conditions
Display of the same location over all cycles for a given lightening condition
Display of the all sample for a given cycle
Display of the same location with bubble elimination
Various statistical tools

Screenshot

Conditions of use

The software is freely available for research purposes. However, it should not be redistributed without the consent of the authors. We expect the user to include a citation of this publication whenever presenting or publishing results that are based on the ImageJ plugin Tribology.

Test images

This animation shows the raw pictures taken of the surface during the running-in of sliding from 0 to 5h.

This animation shows the same pictures after registration.

This animation shows the registered pictures after thresholding to reveal the contact areas in white.

This graph shows the evolution of the white pixel percentage with frame number (i.e. evolution of contact area with time). The bubbles in the pictures create some fluctuation of the contact area. This is visible for frame 8.

Animation shows the effect of bubble subtraction.

This animation shows the pictures from the previous animation after thresholding to reveal the contact areas in white.

This graph shows the evolution of the white pixel percentage. As the bubbles are removed the evolution is smoothed and only shows an increase of the contact area.