Traceable surface characterization of a hydrophobic material using confocal optical microscopy

This work aims to develop a method to traceably characterize structured surfaces. This method includes instrument calibration considering the metrological characteristics defined by ISO 25178-602: 2010, form removal by SVD and LS method, algorithm development, definition of PDF of those input variables, estimate the height parameters Sa, Sq, Ssk, Sku, etc. and evaluate the coverage region of 95%. Validation of this developed algorithm is based on a physical measurement standard and data provided by NIST. The first validation shows 0.0034 µm difference between the calculated Sa and certificated Ra. The second validation compared those height parameters and the differences are as small as -9.2535×10-5 nm. Finally, characterization of the surface height parameters of a hydrophobic material, calculation of the correlation coefficient of the height parameters, and reconstruction as well as histograms of those height parameters is presented.