Easy question: I just need to know what MATLAB products I need to do this

Hello community,

Thanks for reading this! All I need right now is to know what products I need to accomplish this, the rest I will try and figure out on my own.

I need to calculate microscopic volume loss on ball bearings. I am given a set of up to 10,000 x,y,z coordinates (accuracy to 1 um) and I need to do two things:

1. I need to graphically represent the sphere, creating a surface mesh with color differences showing the extent of wear (aka deviation from the center of the best fit sphere) (Non math people and their pictures eh?? give me a chart over pretty colors any day...)

2. Second I need to create an overlying sphere that will estimate the original unworn volume and subtract the volume between the two spheres to calculate volumetric loss.

I don't want to waste your time on asking how to do this, I'll work my hardest to figure that out on my own, but I would really appreciate just knowing any and all matlab products that would help me do this.

Especially the graphical representation and surface mesh creation.

THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME!!

Also any suggestions for other ways or tools matlab offers to represent this information. I don't know all the capabilities of this, so it is hard to implement something you don't know exists.

[Daniel Sufficool]

Thank you!!

Answer 1

[Image Analyst]

I think the base MATLAB can do all this. Though if you're dealing with images and visualizations, the Image Processing Toolbox can be helpful, particularly when calculating things like volume on digital images (as opposed to analytical formulas).

[Walter Roberson]

I would agree, including about the Image Processing.

Depending on how analytical you need to get (e.g., theoretical volumes) you might also find the Symbolic Math Toolbox to be useful.