Abstract
The surface topography produced by the electric discharge machine is analyzed by a stationary stochastic process and the power spectral moment approach. It is shown that the topography can be represented by the Gaussian isotropic surface and its statistical characteristics can be found from a fourth order continuous autoregressive model. The statistical properties such as the wear land, contact area, number of summits per unit area, number of peaks per unit length, surface gradient, spectrum width and the area under the peaks (excess area) are calculated. In particular, the mean number of peaks, expected number of zero crossing per unit length are shown to agree well with theory. The effect of experimental conditions on the surface roughness is also discussed in this paper.
