Basics of Precision Engineering

Advances in engineering precision have tracked with technological progress for hundreds of years. Over the last few decades, precision engineering has been the specific focus of research on an international scale. The outcome of this effort has been the establishment of a broad range of engineering principles and techniques that form the foundation of precision design.

Today’s precision manufacturing machines and measuring instruments represent highly specialised processes that combine deterministic engineering with metrology. Spanning a broad range of technology applications, precision engineering principles frequently bring together scientific ideas drawn from mechanics, materials, optics, electronics, control, thermo-mechanics, dynamics, and software engineering. This book provides a collection of these principles in a single source. Each topic is presented at a level suitable for both undergraduate students and precision engineers in the field. Also included is a wealth of references and example problems to consolidate ideas, and help guide the interested reader to more advanced literature on specific implementations.

Richard Leach is a professor in Metrology at the University of Nottingham and heads the Manufacturing Metrology Team. Prior to this position, he was at the National Physical Laboratory from 1990 to 2014. His primary love is instrument building, from concept to final installation, and his current interests are the dimensional measurement of precision and additive manufactured structures. His research themes include the measurement of surface topography, development of methods for measuring 3D structures, development of methods for controlling large surfaces to high resolution in industrial applications and x-ray computed tomography. He is a leader of several professional societies and a visiting professor at Loughborough University and the Harbin Institute of Technology.

Stuart T. Smith has been working in engineering for four decades starting in 1977 with a factory maintenance apprenticeship with Miles Redfern Limited. He is now a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and leads the Instrument Development Group at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Throughout the years, his main focus has been the development of instrumentation and sensor technologies primarily aimed towards the challenges of atomic scale discrimination, manipulation and manufacture with applications in the fields of optical, biological and mechanical processes.