Druck releases exclusive whitepaper at National Conference of Standard Laboratories
The Druck Team recently presented a paper to the National Conference of Standards Laboratories International trade organisation (NCSLI) in Texas, which we can now share to our wider audience.
We caught up with Druck Senior Metrology Engineer Dr Neculai Moisoi (Nic) who’d worked on the whitepaper with alongside fellow technical specialists Christopher Roberts, Nicholas Wilks, Stephen Sajben, Tom Piggin, and Martin Geear, to ask a few question about what they’d worked on and the Druck technology covered -
1. You recently submitted a Technical Paper to the NCSL International Worldwide News group, which was accepted and latterly published, congratulations, could you tell us a little more about what NCSL International is and what the paper was on?
NCSL International is a professional organization focused on the measurement sciences, popularizing the information in this domain through conferences, published papers, training, focused working groups. We have participated in the 2022 conference and exhibition, held in Dallas (USA) and it was an important event to see new metrology developments, whilst giving us the opportunity to present the ‘Advances in Core Fundamental Sensor Technologies Enabling Improvements in the Metrological Transfer Standards of Pressure Measurement’. These advances will allow users (National Metrology Institutes, Calibration Laboratories, Measurement Equipment Manufacturers) to access very high accuracy calibration at better overall costs, speed and ease of use, including automation.
2. The published papers titled, ‘Advances in Core Fundamental Sensor Technologies Enabling Improvements in the Metrological Transfer Standards of Pressure Measurement’, could you give us a really top-level synapse of that (Link below to full paper for the more technically minded)
The conference presentation and the subsequently published paper are focused on the capability and metrological characteristics of our pressure instruments, which have at heart the TERPS© (Trench Etched Resonant Pressure Sensor). The paper explores the new potential of TERPS© in terms of accuracy, precision and drift, which is also backed up by testing/calibration done by prestigious National Metrology Institutes and Calibration Laboratories. Also, we present how we took this amazing technology and transform it to a such high-performance product, through the appropriate design and characterization/ verification and validation.
3. NCSL International is primarily focused on Metrology? Could you give us an understanding of how Druck fits into that sector and the products involved?
Almost from the beginning, fifty years ago, Druck was involved in Metrology through its instrumentation used for calibration/verification/testing and it is a known brand for metrologists. We have a great variety of instruments used by metrologists and not only, covering laboratory calibrations as the PACE families of controllers and indicators, portable instrumentation or more special applications as Air Data Test Sets used in aviation calibrations. The novelty presented at NCSLI conference and paper is the achievement of such high metrological characteristics that our instruments will be able to replace in many applications, the high accuracy secondary standards as pressure balances (sometimes referred as piston gauges), with a lot of benefits for the users. To highlight a few: less training required as our products are not as complex as pressure balances, faster calibrations, easy to automate and monitor live results.
4. This sounds like a team effort, who from Druck was involved and what where their roles?
The paper was a result of collaboration and hands on work with my colleagues, both from Engineering (Tom Piggin and Martin Geear) and Commercial (Christopher Roberts, Nicholas Wilks and Stephen Sajben). Everyone participated through technical inputs, by collecting data, analysing it, collaborating with external peers and redacting the paper itself. Besides the technical aspects, we had valuable insights from customers/end users on what they need in terms the metrological characteristics, we have presented in this paper.
However, the paper itself represents just the peak for years of work of many our colleagues involved in the development of TERPS© and our instruments, as every single department has taken part in one way or another.
5. Anything else you’d like to add?
The published paper is based on a lot of data to substantiate the high metrological performance of our instruments containing TERPS© and we have also got very positive feedback from user as NMIs and Calibration Laboratories. However, I will encourage the readers of this published paper to contact us for more info as well, as these high accuracy instruments will be available soon.
Paper is available here if you'd like to learn more