Wear analysis through surface relocation

The present paper reports a new method for relocating three-dimensional surface topographies accurately, based on comparison between different displacement vectors and allowing compensation of lateral and rotational misalignments. Relocation is the main step for allowing exploitation of traceable quantification of surface modification, due to wear, etching or friction. The performance of the relocation routine was tested on a reference sample, featuring an array of peaks with a constant lattice of 2.12 \u3bcm