Spherometers form TRIOPTICS arrived at our company this morning. It will help us with high-precision measurements.
Super-Spherotronic is an automatic three ball contacting spherometer designed to meet the highest test plate calibration requirements. Being the most accurate instrument of our line of spherometers, Super-Spherotronic can measure the radius of curvature to an accuracy of 0.01%. To ensure that the highest available accuracy values of radius measurement are obtained, all Super-Spherotronic components have been optimized and perfected so that residual errors are negligible:
- The mainframe components locating the probe are made of massive stainless steel, hardened and fine ground on machine-tools to the highest achievable accuracy. Concentricity of mainframe components to the probe is less than 1 micron (0.00004�).
- The spherometer rings represent one of the key components of the Super-Spherotronic including an incredible amount of work to eliminate any possible error source. Made of heat-treated high quality stainless steel, the rings are machined on high accuracy grinding machine-tools and finally fine-lapped. An ingenious design combined with a special electro-erosion procedure allows the ball and the ball location site to be matched with highest accuracy. Each ring is delivered with a calibration certificate. The measuring accuracy is directly traceable to NIST standard.
- Super Spherotronic
- The supporting balls are also concentrically positioned with an extreme accuracy of less than 1 micron (0.00004�). This highly accurate positioning of the ring balls is an essential and distinctive feature of the Super-Spherotronic, ensuring excellent repeatability. To avoid any thermal and mechanical deformation, the supporting balls are made of wolfram carbide (an extremely hard metal), while the probe center is an ultra-precision ruby ball. This completely eliminates any errors introduces by metallic probe centers used in other spherometers.
- The probe itself is a high precision Heidenhain encoder, specifically selected for this use, having a total systematic and random error of less than 0.2 microns (0.000008�).
- The test plates used for calibration of the instrument are manufactured to high quality standards to an accuracy better than 1/10 wave for sphericity. The test plates are certified by NIST of USA, so that the accuracy of Super-Spherotronic is directly traceable to international standards.
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