New metrology centre of excellence can save industry millions

The Future Metrology Hub, one of eight EPSRC-funded future manufacturing hubs, headquartered at Huddersfield University, will organise the research and development of a range of new measurement methods that form part of accelerating Britain’s manufacturing into the “fourth industrial revolution”.

Millions of components are machined and fabricated every day and measured and validated at the end of the process. New techniques can integrate the measurement inside the manufacturing process, saving industry millions of hours of production time.

Official estimates from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), say that up to one fifth of the total value of UK manufacturing activity is in product verification. The Hub has identified technologies to systematically reduce the time and cost of this testing and validation.

“By embedding metrology inside the process, using universal metrology informatics, and running this through the whole value chain, we can achieve a step change in manufacturing productivity,” said Prof Dame Jane Jiang, the hub’s director.