Dr. Bob Salerno has been in the metrology industry for the past 20 years, and he’s a problem solver. In his role as a mechanical engineer and co-founder of New River Kinematics, he gets a lot of calls from clients in the aerospace and shipbuilding industries for problem solving.

As the industry innovated rapidly, certain issues bubbled to the surface. “One of the reasons people call with production crisis is that they are doing something like trying to get a part to fit, and can’t find the reason why it’s not working. Many times it’s transferring data from one measurement environment to another,” Salerno said.

Another challenge in the industry is the changing technological environment. “Instrumentation is always changing,” Salerno said. “Ten years ago, laser trackers dominated, but now scanners are more common, and laser radar is finding more uses.” It can be a challenge to find solutions for all types of instrumentation.

Each of these instruments brings a different set of strengths and weakness, but the software that they use can be universal with SpatialAnalyzer, a software product created by Salerno and his partner Dr. Joe Calkins.

Major changes in the aircraft industry include moves by commercial aviation and some military manufacturers to create composite monolithic pieces rather than the smaller aluminum or titanium parts of the past. This means major changes to their manufacturing and construction processes.

“Many of the critical components used to be small parts, small enough to put on your desk. Now parts can be the size of a fuselage in circumference. That means that how you inspect things has to change,” Salerno said. “This created a window for portable metrology—it’s distinctive as the only solution to provide that information.”

It’s a paradox that portable metrology equipment can measure much bigger objects than legacy fixed metrology gear. In fact, in parts of Europe, portable equipment is often referred to as “large-volume equipment.”

Managing uncertainty in the measurement process is also a key issue for large parts. “We know that it’s critical that users know the uncertainty associated with every measurement. Tolerances are getting tighter, more than ever before. Our clients say, ‘We need to know where this edge is to plus or minus 0.004 inches.’ If you want to know that, you need a measurement system that not only provides the edge location, but does so with acceptable uncertainty,” Salerno said. For engineers in manufacturing, this can mean less rework and less waste.

Another challenge for metrology is that instrumentation needs to have compatibility with each other and be able to share data and create reports. For years, issues with instrument compatibility and equipment integration have occurred, but the industry is making a software change that may eliminate those issues. Not only is the data from different systems compatible now, the process of gathering the data is now standardized. This allows operators to be proficient at running more than one type of instrument.

Salerno also said that one of the most universal changes is that his clients have changed how they problem-solve. “I think they can focus more on how they wanted to solve the problem, whereas before they were limited and constrained by the tools they had. Rather than adapting a task to what they had, they could just think about how they want to solve it,” he said.