TITLE: Verifying Successful Training on an Instrument.

DESCRIPTION: My name is Simeona Hein and I’m a graduate student in materials science & engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. One of the first ways I used the Surface Topography Challenge (STC) samples was to verify my training on a surface-measurement tool. Specifically, I was a new grad student and got trained on a stylus profilometer. I knew that the tool was good, but I wanted to prove to myself and my advisor that I had been trained well and could produce accurate results. So I decided to measure the Surface-Topography Challenge surfaces and compare my measurements against the consensus results.

OVERALL PROCESS: The process was simple: measure the STC surfaces, upload the data to contact.engineering, and compare the resulting power spectral density (PSD) to the published consensus data. Because the consensus PSD represents measurements collected by many researchers using different instruments, it provided a useful benchmark for evaluating my own results.

DETAILS: Here is a standard operating procedure (SOP) describing specifically how I performed the analysis.

RESULT: As shown in the figure, my data (green and red) aligned very well with the consensus data (blue and orange). Good agreement with the consensus data gave me confidence that both my measurement procedure and analysis workflow were working as intended before moving on to unknown samples.