The tube protects against beam breaks and has a slot and brush seal on the bottom to allow laser optics attached to the gantry to move freely, but protected from chips and coolant. The air temperature sensor is attached to a wire running down the side of the laser source. This five-axis gantry, used for cutting metals, is equipped with laser and temperature compensation packages for greater control and higher accuracy. According to Ray Sanchez, manufacturing engineer at Alson, aircraft manufacturers have upped the ante for accuracy and precision during the past few years, in an effort to reduce assembly time, effort and tooling, and to move to automated assembly. Instead of using fixtures and shims to bring parts into assembly tolerance, they want the parts to meet the tolerances.
Weight is another issue.
Less variance on the hundreds of parts that make up a plane can cut dozens of pounds from an aircraft s final weight, enabling aircraft manufacturers to achieve greater capacity, range and fuel efficiency. While they were good enough at one time, and still are for short axes, a number of variables degrade their measurement accuracy. The laser scale uses interferometry to achieve extraordinary accuracy. The unit of measurement is a wavelength of light 0.633 micron long. The scale then counts the number of wavelengths that change between the two beams as the moving retroreflector travels.