The manufacturing of large size products and components, such as aircrafts and wind turbines, poses metrological challenges. In the approach by coordinates, measurements are confronted with thermal issues met in non‑cooperative production environments. This makes a “metric space” of large size whereby the positions of individual point can be measured with sufficient accuracy hard to realise. Interferometric measurements are problematic too in non‑cooperative environments due to the difficulty in measuring the refractive index of the air, variable all along the measurement optical beam.
The LaVA project carried on previous work done in the LUMINAR project and attacked typical problems met in specific applications. It investigated the Frequency‑Scanning Interferometry (FSI), the measurement of the position in space within medium‑large volumes, the measurement of the refractive index of the air in industrial environment, the digital data integration of measurement results yielded by different instruments, and the machine tools of large dimensions.
The INRIM developed an acoustic thermometer to measure the air temperature distributed along a line, a key element for deriving the refractive index of the air. Furthermore, it led the work package on the machine tool application and developed a novel apparatus for the measurement of geometry errors.
Contributing scientific sectors
