This article presents the results of an LMM-R-2019 interlaboratory comparison. Such comparisons of different families of measuring instruments are one of the activities conducted among the calibration laboratories to maintain their ISO 17025 accreditation. Given that the study of surface roughness is becoming increasingly important in the field of dimensional metrology, the comparison focused on determining the Ra parameter on a pseudorandom metallic roughness standard using two types of measuring instruments: physical contact (stylus instruments) and optical (confocal microscopes). Among the aspects studied was whether the roughness measurements obtained using calibrated confocal microscopes could be compared with those using traditional methods since optical instruments obtain measurements more quickly and responsively than do stylus instruments. The results showed that roughness measurements using confocal microscopes are comparable with those from a traditional stylus instrument.

Coordinate metrology techniques are widely used in industry to carry out dimensional measurements. For applications involving measurements in the submillimeter range, the use of optical, non-contact instruments with suitable traceability is usually advisable. One of the most used instruments to perform measurements of this type is the confocal microscope. In this paper, the authors present a complete calibration procedure for confocal microscopes designed to be implemented preferably in workshops or industrial environments rather than in research and development departments. Therefore, it has been designed to be as simple as possible. The procedure was designed without forgetting any of the key aspects that need to be taken into account and is based on classical reference material standards. These standards can be easily found in industrial dimensional laboratories and easily calibrated in accredited calibration laboratories. The procedure described in this paper can be easily adapted to calibrate other optical instruments (e.g., focus variation microscopes) that perform 3D dimensional measurements in the submillimeter range.

One of the most important fields of study in material science is surface characterization. This topic is currently a field of growing interest as many functional properties depend on the surface texture. In this paper the authors, after a short a review of different methods for surface topography characterization and the determination of the traceability problems that arise in this type of measurements, propose four different designs of material standards that can be used to calibrate the most common optical measuring instruments used for these tasks, such as measuring microscopes, metallurgical microscopes, confocal microscopes, focus variation microscopes, etc. The authors consider that the use of this type of standards (or others similar to them) could provide a step forward in assuring metrological traceability for different metrological characteristics that enables a more precise measurement of surface features with optical measuring instruments. In addition, authors expect that this work could lay the groundwork for the development of custom standards with specialized features tuned to gain a better metrological control when measuring specific geometrical surface properties.

Additive manufacturing technologies, among which is 3D printing, is one of the fundamental pillars of industry 4.0, since it allows to obtain prototypes and manufactured parts in a fast, versatile and economical way. To ensure the quality of production, it is necessary that all parts obtained through any manufacturing process meet the specifications of the design. However, it is not enough for a certain part to meet the dimensional design specifications, but most parts manufactured on the same machine must do so. This paper proposes two pattern models to study the reproducibility and for the correction of the scales that must be applied to a commercial 3D printer to obtain printed parts by fused filament deposition (FDM).

Additive manufacturing technologies, among which is 3D printing, is one of the fundamental pillars of Industry 4.0, since it allows to obtain prototypes and manufactured parts in a fast, versatile, and economical way. The result of the 3D printing process is affected by the effects that the different parameters of the process have on materials such as PLA, which is the most widely used. In this article, the effect of layer height, speed and printing temperature on parts manufactured with 3D printing will be studied, making a dimensional study with a profile projector. It has been determined that, among the three parameters, the extrusion temperature has the greatest effect.