LIMA is now a partner on the European LUMINAR project. The aim of this project is to tackle several fundamental issues affecting users of Large Volume Metrology (LVM) equipment and techniques in industrial locations. By bringing advanced metrology to bear on these issues the consortium hopes to reinvigorate R&D efforts across Europe into LVM and to stimulate new opportunities and novel application areas, whilst retaining the traceability to the SI required for multi-national operations often encountered in the aerospace and science communities.
LIMA is leading the work package to develop advanced modelling of multi-component assemblies is designed to enable end-users, particularly those in large aerospace or marine manufacture and assembly to demonstrate conformance to tolerance without expensive and energy-intensive thermal control of large environments such as aircraft hangars. Other work within the project will cover compensation of laser and photogrammetry based measurements for refractive index and turbulence effects. This should allow users in large factories and assembly locations to reduce the measurement uncertainties associated with existing and future optical-based measuring systems, thereby allowing more accurate alignment, machining and assembly. Compensation for the effects of refractive index variations can be an enabling step for future factory wide metrology networks, allowing progress towards the vision of the ‘future factory’. Demonstration of new traceable ADM technologies can allow the next generation of commercial instruments to achieve intrinsic traceability to the SI. The line-of-sight refractive index systems and ADM systems could be coupled to provide refractive index compensated reference lengths for other measuring systems, e.g. photogrammetry networks, helping instruments to maintain accuracy in uncontrolled environments.
Leave a Reply