The Scientific Technical Committee Precision Engineering and Metrology (STC P) had two meetings in 2022 – on February 17 and August 26, 2022.  The February meeting was held in virtual format via Zoom, attended by 80 members and 5 invited guests. The August meeting was held in Bilbao, Spain in hybrid format, attended by 74 members (including 23 online) and 11 invited guests.

 
During the February 2022 meeting STC P discussed the status of the future keynote papers, which were decided in the previous meetings, based on the general trends in manufacturing influencing the STC P scope of activities.  Since keynote papers until 2026 were already decided, there were no new proposals for a keynote paper beyond this date.

Following the guidance of the CIRP Council, STC P Board invited two well-known industrial researchers to provide their companies’ perspectives on trends and opportunities in optical metrology for Industry 4.0.  During this topical session, introduced by Prof. Chris Evans, Dr. Peter de Groot of Zygo Corp in the U.S. presented a talk entitled, “Revolutions in optical metrology in the era of ‘big data’ and Industry 4.0” and Dr. Michael Totzeck of ZEISS, Germany presented a talk entitled, “Fundamental challenges of quality assurance and control for additive manufacturing.”  As expected, covering hot topics of optical metrology, big data, Industry 4.0, and additive manufacturing stimulated significant level of interest and discussions among the meeting attendees.  Those discussions were well summarized in the minutes of the meeting.

Prof. T. Tolio and Prof. R. Schmidt introduced the new CIRP publication series, CIRP Novel Topics in Production Engineering (CNPTE) to the attendees and welcomed proposed topics from STC P to be finalized in the August meeting.

There were three short technical presentations followed by short discussions:

1. Electric contact resistance in instrumented indentation test: data fusion for measurement uncertainty reduction, (M. Galetto, Politecnico di Torino)
2. Optimization of Si capped sensors by low-coherence heterodyne LDV technology, (M. Heilig, Polytec GmbH)
3. Uncertainty quantification in predictive quality establishing trust in machine learning to enable qualified virtual inspections, (R. Schmitt, WZL/RWTH Aachen)

Information on relevant ISO/TC213 and ISO/TC39 standards were provided by Dr. A. Balsamo and Dr. W. Knapp, respectively.  These were followed by the updates from CWG-AI, CWG-Bio, and CMAG meetings.

Finally, A. Donmez reminded the attendees about the upcoming elections for the new STC P Board, providing procedures and timelines.

During the August 2022 meeting, STC P thanked Prof. W. Dewulf and his co-authors for preparing and presenting 2022 STC P Keynote paper, “Advances in performance and traceability of X-ray CT metrology.” The paper was presented by Prof. Dewulf during CIRP Plenary session on August 22^nd in Bilbao, which generated significant interest by CIRP members.  STC P also discussed the status of future keynote papers providing inputs to the corresponding keynote authors.

During the meeting, STC P approved the proposal by Prof. F. Fang to submit a paper, entitled “Atomic and close-to-atomic scale manufacturing,” as the STC P contribution to this year’s edition of CNTPE.

The following short technical presentations were given during the meeting, followed by short discussions:

1. Autonomous scan path generation for laser line scanners, (Michiel Vlaeyen, KU Leuven, Belgium)
2. Deep-learning based point-light photometric stereo for 3D reconstruction of metalic surfaces, (Ping Guo, Northwestern University, USA)
3. Performance characterization of camera based on-machine tool presetting and evaluation system, (Giuliano Bissacco, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark)
4. High-throughput micro-skiving of microstructured surfaces, (Zhiwei Zhu, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, China)
5. Advances in sub-nm closed-loop control of the shape of adaptive X-ray mirrors, (Vivek G. Badami, Zygo Corporation, USA)
6. Comb-based optical frequency synthesizer for precision metrology with 15-digit accuracy, (Seung-Woo Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, KAIST, Republic of Korea)
7. Precise micro-geometrical measurement of large components by a focus-variation sensor integrated on a cobot, (Gianfranco Genta, Politecnico di Torino, Italy)
8. Quality prediction of micro gears based on in-process acoustic emission, (Florian Stamer, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)

At the end of the meeting A. Donmez announced the results of the STC P Board elections.  He congratulated and welcomed the new Board:

Prof. A. Archenti, Chair,
Prof. Y. Takaya, Vice-Chair,
Prof. E. Morse, Secretary.

STC P paper session was held on Tuesday, August 23, 2022. There were 8 technical presentations covering topics of optical and vision-based metrology, the use of AI and deep learning in metrology, as well as ultrasound-based metrology applications for defect detection.  They were all well presented by the authors and generated lively discussions during the session.  However, it is worth noting that there were unusually low number of paper submissions to STC P this year.  This may be due to pandemic related restrictions to laboratory access for experimental research. 

Alkan Donmez
October 31, 2022