Factors Associated With the Accuracy of Depth Gauge Measurements

Background: It is important to select appropriate screws in orthopedic surgeries, as excessively long or too short a screw may results failure of the surgeries. This study explored factors that affect the accuracy of measurements in terms of the experience of the surgeons, passage of drilled holes and different depth gauges.Methods: Holes were drilled into fresh porcine femurs with skin in three passages, straight drilling through the metaphysis, straight drilling through the diaphysis, and angled drilling through the diaphysis. Surgeons with different surgical experiences measured the holes with the same depth gauge and using a vernier caliper as gold standard. The length of selected screws, and the time each surgeon spent were recorded. The measurement accuracy was compared based on the experiences of the surgeons and the passage of drilled holes. Further, parameters of depth gauges and 12-mm cortical bone screws from five different manufacturers were measured.Results: A total of 13 surgeons participated in 585 measurements in this study, and each surgeon completed 45 measurements. For the surgeons in the senior, intermediate, and junior groups, the average time spent in measurements was 689, 833, and 785 s with an accuracy of 57.0, 42.2, and 31.5%, respectively. The accuracy and measurement efficiency were significantly different among the groups of surgeons (P < 0.001). The accuracy of measurements was 45.1% for straight metaphyseal drilling, 43.6% for straight diaphyseal drilling, and 33.3% for angled diaphyseal drilling (P = 0.036). Parameters of depth gauges and screws varied among different manufacturers.Conclusion: Both observer factor and objective factors could affect the accuracy of depth gauge measurement. Increased surgeon's experience was associated with improvements in the accuracy rate and measurement efficiency of drilled holes based on the depth gauge. The accuracy rate varied with hole passages, being the lowest for angled drilled holes.

Numerical and Experimental Investigations On Cross-sensitivity Characteristics of Instrumented Wheelset Associated with Longitudinal Force and Lateral Contact Position

It is crucial to grasp wheel-rail contact forces in the evaluation of running safety and curving performance of railway vehicles. To measure the wheel-rail contact forces, instrumented wheelset, which has the strain gauges on the wheel surface, is widely used. The purpose of this research is to increase the measurement accuracy of the wheel-rail contact forces by understanding the detailed characteristics of the instrumented wheelset. Although the various research works on the instrumented wheelset have been carried out to increase the measurement accuracy of wheel-rail contact forces, there are few works considering the longitudinal force and the lateral shift of the wheel-rail contact point. However, sometimes the longitudinal force has a non-negligible influence on the measurement accuracy on the instrumented wheelset. In this paper, the authors clarify the cross-sensitivity characteristics of the instrumented wheelset when the longitudinal force is applied to the various lateral position on the wheel tread through the FEM analysis and the static load test. The authors also propose a method to approximate the cross-sensitivity as an analytical function of the lateral and circumferential contact positions.

Comparative Study of AC Signal Analysis Methods for Impedance Spectroscopy Implementation in Embedded Systems

For embedded impedance spectroscopy, a suitable method for analyzing AC signals needs to be carefully chosen to overcome limited processing capability and memory availability. This paper compares various methods, including the fast Fourier transform (FFT), the FFT with barycenter correction, the FFT with windowing, the Goertzel filter, the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT), and sine fitting using linear or nonlinear least squares, and cross-correlation, for analyzing AC signals in terms of speed, memory requirements, amplitude measurement accuracy, and phase measurement accuracy. These methods are implemented in reference systems with and without hardware acceleration for validation. The investigation results show that the Goertzel algorithm has the best overall performance when hardware acceleration is excluded or in the case of memory constraints. In implementations with hardware acceleration, the FFT with barycentre correction stands out. The linear sine fitting method provides the most accurate amplitude and phase determinations at the expense of speed and memory requirements.

The design of the sampling parameters for CMM of free-form surfaces

In order to improve the inspection accuracy of free-form surface by CMM, this paper adopted the different sampling parameters to research the influence of the measurement accuracy of free-form surface. Through the combination of area uniform block random sampling and Latin hypercube random sampling, the minimum sampling grid block area and ball diameter were taken as the research parameters. Firstly, this research analysed theoretically the influence of measurement accuracy of free-form surface by different sampling parameters. Secondly, carrying out experiments verified the analytical results. Then, the influence of two groups of sampling parameters on the normal deviation of free-form surface could be acquired by analysing the experimental data. Finally, this research could obtain the result of normal deviation of free-form surface. The research results showed that the minimum block area of sampling and the diameter of measuring ball become smaller, and the profile error become larger when the number of measuring points were the same, the more it can reflect the actual contour of the free-form surface, which proves that the measurement accuracy is higher.

Резонансная микроволновая спектроскопия полупроводников с микронным разрешением

We have proposed and experimentally verified a local method of microwave resonant spectroscopy of semiconductors. The microwave circuit of the spectrometer based on the Cascade Microtech probe station is equipped with a coaxial resonator of special geometry. As result, the measurement accuracy of the previously developed volt-impedance spectroscopy method was greatly increased. A technique for spectrometer calibration and resonant measurements of the complex impedance of the probe-sample system has been developed. We have measured the impedance of test structures with Schottky contacts of 30 - 60 μm in diameter on a single-crystal GaAs wafer at several discrete frequencies in the range of 50 - 250 MHz. The nontrivial resistive properties of the structures are studied, which consist of the excess resistance that is 1–2 orders higher than the spreading resistance for the alternating current in the unperturbed region of the semiconductor. The discovered effect is presumably associated with the a.c. charge modulation on deep levels of the semiconductor. A model calculation of the impedance spectrum has been performed, which demonstrates a good agreement with the experimental spectra.