Thermal compensation using the hybrid metrology approach compared to traditional scaling

Control of temperature in large-scale manufacturing environments is not always practical or economical, introducing thermal effects including variation in ambient refractive index and thermal expansion. Thermal expansion is one of the largest contributors to measurement uncertainty; however, temperature distributions are not widely measured. Uncertainties can also be introduced in scaling to standard temperature. For more complex temperature distributions with non-linear temperature gradients, uniform scaling is unrealistic. Deformations have been measured photogrammetrically in two thermally challenging scenarios with localised heating. Extended temperature measurement has been tested with finite element analysis to assess a compensation methodology for coordinate measurement. This has been compared to commonly used uniform scaling and has outperformed this with a highly simplified finite element analysis simulation in scaling a number of coordinates at once. This work highlighted the need for focus on reproducible temperature measurement for dimensional measurement in non-standard environments.