Development of a technique for correcting images of electrode spots obtained with a NewView 5010 surface structure analyzer

Abstract

Spots of single spark discharges of various energies (from 5 to 19 J) deposited on a flat polished surface of an iron electrode in an air atmosphere have been studied. The spots were studied using a NewView 5010 surface structure analyzer from Zygo Corp. (USA). However, images acquired with the analyzer have a number of artifacts such as missing data points, spikes, and background noise. The reasons for their occurrence are the steep slopes of the surface of the discharge spots, and also, apparently, the low reflectivity of individual sections. Since a complete array of height values is desirable for the analysis of the physical parameters of the discharge spots, a technique was developed for restoring images by the method of two-dimensional weighted average interpolation followed by smoothing. Based on the Mathcad software environment, a technique has been developed for determining the parameters of discharge craters, which includes measuring the area, diameter and volume of each crater, and obtaining their statistical characteristics. In addition, a window application was developed for the Windows operating system, which is capable of explicitly interpolating the original microscope data, creating a visual height map, and saving the recovered data array as a text file.