Special issue on geometrical products design and their metrology

This special issue derived from 12th CIRP Conference on Computer Aided Tolerancing CIRP CAT 2012, which brought scientists and engineers together over a wide range of disciplines highlighting the critically important connections between Geometrical Products Design and their Measurement.

The technical progress in this area has been driven primarily by the need to make manufacturing more efficient and economic while at the same time optimizing performance. The trend of global manufacturing, along with the emergence of computer-aided technologies, urges a more rigorous and systematic technical language to characterize geometrical products throughout the product supply chain. This involves exploring various scientific fundaments for new applications in the geometrical products specification and verification (GPS) system.

One important aspect of this special issue highlights is continuing effort in understanding fundamental concepts, theory and models in the GPS system, in applying them to optimize tolerance models with functional performance and reduced cost, and in improving them to accelerate the maturation and applications in the GPS system. Another aspect of the publication is to tackle measurement and calibration problems in nanotechnology and macro metrology. A series of novel techniques have been devoted to improve measurement accuracy, stability and traceability. It is hoped the functionality of geometrical products can benefit from these improved techniques.

The exposure of these new techniques in this special issue is expected to open a new door for advanced manufacturing in a global context, as well as to identify the development directions for future Computer-Aided Tolerancing. Within this scope, the selected papers for this Special Issue cover a wide range of subjects, from specification and standardisation, tolerancing in design/manufacturing, process/product, life management to quality control, verification and metrology ¹ .

The Guest Editor would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the authors and reviewers for their outstanding contributions and especially would like to sincerely acknowledge the support from Professor Paul G Maropoulos, the journal editor, and Sarah Howe and Ruth Cranks at SAGE Publications, for their support.

Professor Xiangqian Jane Jiang, FREngDirector of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Advanced MetrologyUniversity of HuddersfieldHuddersfieldHD1 3DHUK