All Features
George Schuetz
Whether you’re a small machine shop or a large multimillion-dollar manufacturing giant, there’s no doubt you use dimensional gauges to maintain the standards for quality in your production.
The accuracy of these dimensional measuring instruments must be periodically checked to ensure that they’re…
Gabriel Popkin
Time: We all have a sense of it, an innate feel for it. We see it and use it every day. If you’re like me, the first thing you do in the morning is check the time on your phone to see if you need to get out of bed or if you can close your eyes and catch a few more z’s.
Once you’re up and moving,…
Creaform
In today’s market, it seems like all 3D scanners have similar specifications, as if manufacturers look at their competitors’ data and use the same numbers. Data sheets, marketing videos, and even product appearances all look comparable, making it difficult to distinguish quality based on technical…
Chris Rush
While clinical trials are the gold standard for generating clinical data to use as evidence of your medical device’s safety and effectiveness, they are by no means the only way to gather clinical evidence.
Real-world data (RWD), which typically come from routine healthcare delivery or…
Sandy Ressler
Wilhelm Weber gets the distinction of having the unit of magnetic flux, the weber (Wb), named in his honor. Magnetic flux measures the total magnetic field that passes through a surface.
(Wondering how to pronounce weber? Hear all about it from one of our researchers.)
The amount of magnetic flux…
Mei Lee Ngan
I once transformed my face to look like Ron Swanson—for science.
I never thought disguising myself with wigs and makeup would be part of my job, but as a NIST facial recognition researcher I sometimes do just that. To make myself look like the gruff character from the show Parks and Recreation, I…
Creaform
Centurion Performance & Engines (CP&E) is an Illinois-based manufacturer of custom performance engines and parts. It’s also a custom tuning and install body shop in high demand.
Founded in 2009, the company has a research and development department equipped with advanced tools including a…
IDS Imaging Development Systems
Nuclear fusion is seen as a possible visionary solution to the energy problems of the future—clean and comparatively low-risk. Small atomic nuclei are fused at extreme temperatures and pressures instead of being split as in the reactors of conventional nuclear power plants. A similar process takes…
Thierry Mantel
Metal cold-rolling is a critical process in manufacturing various steel and aluminum products. As manufacturers look for ways to modernize and streamline their manufacturing and quality control processes, digital technologies are poised to transform the metal cold-rolling industry by offering…
James Olthoff
Practically everything you use in your everyday life works because of measurement science. Without precise measurements, your car wouldn’t run, your phone wouldn’t work, hospitals couldn’t function, and the ATM would fail.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is the national…
MIT News
Imagine how a phone call works. Your voice is converted into electronic signals, shifted up to higher frequencies, transmitted over long distances, and then shifted back down so it can be heard clearly on the other end. The process enabling this shifting of signal frequencies is called frequency…
Sabine Terrasi
Wire bonding is a key process in semiconductor production. Extremely fine wires with diameters of 15 to 75 µm are used to create tiny electrical connections between a semiconductor chip and other components. The distances between the bond wires are often less than 100 µm. Any deviation, however…
Paul Sagar
In 1988, a small company began developing and supplying electronic instruments that automatically compensate for temperature-induced errors in industrial gages that are used to make precision dimensional measurements. Its products are now in use worldwide, improving factories and workshops that…
NIST
The world keeps time with the ticks of atomic clocks, but a new type of clock under development—a nuclear clock—could revolutionize how we measure time and probe fundamental physics.
An international research team led by scientists at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (JILA), a…
NIST
It’s not easy making green.
Scientists have made small red and blue lasers for years, but other colors have been a challenge. Now, researchers have filled an important technology gap by creating orange, yellow, and green lasers tiny enough to fit on a chip. Low-noise, compact lasers in this…
George Schuetz
Electronic temperature compensation in gaging has become a valuable tool in improving the accuracy and gage repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) of gages in harsh manufacturing environments.
The need for temperature compensation comes into play when the expected errors from temperature…
Adam Zewe
Identifying one faulty turbine in a wind farm, which can involve looking at hundreds of signals and millions of data points, is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
Engineers often streamline this complex problem using deep-learning models that can detect anomalies in measurements taken…
George Schuetz
We ended the previous gaging article talking about the 10:1 rule as it applies to the performance of a gage.
The rule says that the gage should perform to a level better than 10% of the tolerance. Although this rule has mostly been replaced by the more scientific and standardized GR&R…
Sabine Terrasi
Up-to-date and accurate maps of the waterways are a prerequisite for safe and efficient shipping in Germany. Authorities such as the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency, but also private harbor operators, are obliged to provide these maps in an up-to-date form at all times. Primarily, the…
Oliver Hagenlocher
MR Components, of Grigno, Italy, has significantly increased its production capacity and simultaneously improved quality by introducing intelligent automation with EMAG CNC machines.
The company, which specializes in the production of parts for differential and planetary gears, now produces around…
Automated Precision Inc.
In the highly competitive automotive industry, quality control is paramount to ensuring the reliability, safety, and performance of vehicles. Metrology, the science of measurement, plays a crucial role in achieving these high standards at every stage of automotive production and testing. Let’s…
Creaform
The WAB-GROUP is where innovation and tradition come together to provide customers with world-class solutions in the areas of wet grinding technology, three-dimensional-shaking mixing technology, and flow chemistry.
Present in 42 countries worldwide and anchored since 2008 in its state-of-the-art…
Megan King
In 2018, the world agreed to redefine the kilogram. Instead of being pegged to the mass of a physical object in a vault in France, the kilogram is now defined by a few fundamental constants in nature.
This means researchers no longer have to worry about a physical object that can decay or change…
George Schuetz
In this job, I get a lot of questions. In fact, I did some figuring the other day and estimated, conservatively, that we have probably answered at least 50,000 gauging questions over the past 35 years or so.
Some of these questions have been challenging. They’ve pushed me to learn more about my…
Megan Wallin-Kerth
As the July 22–25, 2024, Coordinate Metrology Society Conference (CMSC) rapidly approaches, quality professionals anticipate opportunities to explore and showcase various products and ideas from some of the biggest names and organizations. InnovMetric, Hexagon, Renishaw, Nikon, and many others will…
