Optical Metrology and Sensors

Motivation

European manufacturing industry is under strong pressure from many different economical, social and market factors: High labour cost, Lack of flexibility, low efficiency for high customized production, high cost of technology acquisition and integration, ecological cost and impact, difficulties to adapt the production to the uncertainty of a high competitive global market.

Flexible production requires a continuous information feedback from the process in order to guarantee high production quality, process stability and cost optimization. Sensors are required to enable information gathering both from processes and products, enabling continuous management and guiding of the processes and quick reconfiguration of the tools and methods.

The engineers have a broad catalogue of different optical sensors to measure physical and chemical quantities, such as machine vision, 1D to 3D metrology, position location, optical tomography, photoacoustics, laser ultrasound, laser spectroscopy, x-ray imaging, infrared thermography, industrial tomography, temperature measurement, pressure measurement, colour measurement, and many other types of applications.

Optical sensors will open a new area for online inspection of production processes giving access to high potentials of increase of productivity and quality.

But also in biology, chemistry and medicine there is a high demand for optical measure technology and inspection.

The Focus Group "Optical Metrology and Sensors" will provide a platform for the communication between experts from science and industry which helps to identify new trends in the field and contributes to a greater presence and visibility and optical metrology and sensors on the European level.

First activities and communication of the Focus Group

In the a meeting held during the EOS Annual Meeting in Paris, October 19, 2006 - participants discussed on first possible topics of this Focus Group:

• Optical metrology for the automatic production
• Space optics
• Metrology in space
• Optical instruments: Wave-front sensors, diffractive elements
• Reflectometry

We also discussed the possibility to cooperate with the already existing working group "optical metrology" of the German Society of Applied Optics (DGaO). It is proposed to organize a meeting in 2007 with few invited talks to discuss further steps like topics, organisation of the FG, coordinator etc.

It was proposed to make a "who is who in metrology"

The following information could then be placed and permanently refreshed through the EOS secretary:

• General information about FG Optical Metrology and Sensors
• Contact address for members and newcomers
• Calendar for meetings etc.

The following information on the home-page of the metrology focus group will be only accessible for members of this group:

• Addresses of the members (needs personal authority)
• Topics discussed in the FG
• Nondisclosure agreement
• Other confidential information