# Frictional Behaviour of the Microstructural Surfaces Created by Cylindrical Grinding Processes
## 1 Introduction
It provides high precision control of the size and shape, enabling the construction of optimized geometrical parameters and can be used for a wide range of materials including metals, ceramic and polymers [10; 11]. Etching and photochemical etching is another alternative method for creating such microstructural surface topographies. It was concluded from the study that the etching process is more cost effective and allowed for more complex geometries on the surface [12]. Despite the popularity and advantages of LST and etching, there are some downsides of these techniques. Their resulting surface is usually quite rough and, due to the material pile up, will still need further processing, especially for the radii of corners. To produce a precise micro structural surface, laser processing needs to use a large amount of energy, while for the etching process, erosion materials used as well as the processing waste are highly polluted with negative impacts to the environment. The conventional mechanical processing to produce micro-structural surface shows their advantages. A mechanical method that has been widely used to produce microstructural texture surfaces is milling. By machining intersecting grooves in different directions and applying different tool geometries, a great variety of complex microstructures can be manufactured. The problems with this are a long processing time, material debris removal, the tedious effort on algorithm design and their machining G-code generation for required precision [13; 14]. The abrasive technology, as an important manufacturing process, is usually applied as a final process procedure. The honing process can create the cross hatch or linear texture on the cylinder and sliding surface. Several experimental results [15; 16] already showed that texture by honing influences significantly on friction performances. The valley of texture could act as an oil repository and plays a critical role in the fluid dynamic performance. Similar to the honing process, the microstructural cylindrical grinding is a precision process and can process different material with precision tolerance. By utilizing the specific dressing strategy and grinding conditions, different sizes of microstructure can be obtained and controlled by cylindrical plunge grinding [17]. The surface microstructure created by cylindrical grinding can be divided into the following two principal parts: plateaus and gauge valleys. These valleys may play a significant role in improving on the surface frictional performance. Initial tests [18] on ground cylindrical surface friction illustrated encourage results, thus a comprehensive investigation on the friction behaviour of a ground cylindrical microstructural surface is necessary. In this paper, a set of microstructural surfaces were created on carbon steel samples by cylindrical grinding. The tribological tests of these microstructural surfaces were conducted under different normal workloads and rotational speeds in a fully lubricated situation to investigate the influence of microstructures on the surface friction behaviour.