Surface error measurement system for bearing ball with laser interferometry

To avoid the influence from sphericity error of spherical mirror on the results in bearing ball measurement with laser interferometry, a Tyman-Green interference method by a plane reference mirror instead of a spherical mirror for the spherical surface error measurement of bearings ball is proposed and a prototype interferometer is developed. Following phase shifting interferometry principle, the interferometer system controls piezoelectric ceramic transducer phase shifter to move the plane reference mirror to obtain more interference images. The images are captured by charge-coupled device camera and then the spherical surface error is evaluated by phase unwrapping. Zernike polynomials fitting is chosen to eliminate the alignment errors from out-off-focus. Experiments verify its effectiveness and robustness, and the root mean square difference of results between surface error measurement system and ZYGO interferometer system is 0.004λ while the difference of peak-to-peak value is 0.001 6λ between the two systems. The method can be expected to apply to the other fields of roundness measurement.