The surface quality of high gloss polished steel sheets with respect to 'orange peel' is studied. This is motivated by the fact that workpieces are ranked solely on the visual appearance of finished surfaces according to the observed degree of orange peel. Here, to quantify the degree of orange peel, surface topographies of industrial samples are acquired by means of phase shifting interferometry, from which various surface roughness parameters are calculated. These parameters are related to qualitative aspects of the surface using the Spearman's rank correlation coefficient. Two surface roughness parameters were identified as necessary for the evaluation of orange peel, suggesting that traditional methods can be replaced with suitable parameters that improve quality control procedures at the industry.
In this contribution, the orange peel on highly polished metallic surfaces was analysed by means of a 3D interferometric microscope and also using spectroscopic ellipsometry. Firstly, the surface topography of polished metallic samples, in view to detect orange peel, was determined using a phase-shifting interferometer. This metrological 3D analysis showed that the orange peel can be seen as a periodic waviness on the surface. Then the optical properties of the investigated samples were studied via spectroscopic ellipsometry at various incident angles. These ellipsometric measurements proved that the samples have peculiar optical properties. In particular, it was found that the resulting pseudo-dielectric function in the entire range from 1.5 eV to 2.5 eV -as obtained based on the measured ellipsometric parameters-does depend on the surface topography of the samples. Based in this experimental finding, it is then immediately shown that spectroscopic ellipsometry can be applied to qualitatively describe the orange peel on highly polished metallic surfaces.
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