£93k EPSRC grant for measurement research
Fri, 24 May 2013 14:46:00 BST
Senior Research Fellow investigates high-speed on-line surface profile optical measurement technique
(pictured) has been awarded £93,668 for a research project which will enable companies making advanced products that depend on ultra-precise surfaces to achieve new levels of efficiency and cost-saving. Current methods of measurement during manufacture result in a huge proportion of products having to be discarded because of imperfections.
The manufacture of thin and flexible photovoltaic film – which can store solar energy – plus hard disks, optics, silicon wafers and a wide range of micro-engineered products will gain from Dr Gao’s project, which has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), under its First Grant Scheme, aimed at academics in the early stage of their careers.
Currently, Dr Gao explains, the measurement of nano-scale and ultra-precise surfaces is heavily dependent on the practical experience of process engineers backed up by an expensive trial-and-error approach. As a result, between 50 and 70 per cent of the items manufactured have to be scrapped because of imperfections.
Also, industries such as the emerging sector of flexible electronics and firms manufacturing foil products use processes that require many layers of thin film. But the more layers that are deposited on top of each other, the greater the chance of defects.
There is a pressing need for an inspection process that can measure such products and correct defects with no interruption to production. Dr Gao’s EPSRC-backed project will tackle the problem by investigating a high-speed, on-line surface profile optical measurement technique. It is based on white light spectral interferometry, a non-contact method for measuring surfaces, plus signal processing using a general purpose graphic processing unit.
Surface Metrology
Dr Gao is a Senior Research Fellow working within the University of Huddersfield’s Surface Metrology Group, which is part of the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Advanced Metrology. The Centre’s facilities and expertise will play a key role in the success of the new research project, which should be completed by August 2014.
Dr Gao gained his first degrees in precision test and instrumentation at Tianjin University and began his research career at National Institute of Metrology of China, winning a major award for one of his projects. In 1995 he became a visiting scholar at Germany’s Physikalisch-Techniche-Bundesanstalt and two years later he relocated to the UK for PhD study in precision measurement.
He has published 38 papers on measurement science and instrumentation. He has extensive experienced in the research and development of industrial measuring instruments, laser interferometry, coordinate measuring machine, scanning probe microscopy and scanning white light interferometry.
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