We proposed to accompany the SFWA-BLADE flight test phase with adequate wing surface metrology, to measure profile, waviness, steps, gaps, 3D disturbances, and surface roughness. The envisaged metrology system already exists and its performance to the specifications stipulated in the call had been demonstrated on relevant reference artefacts. So far, we have successfully used it for on-site BLADE wing tooling measurements, demonstrating portability besides the uncertainty required.

The measurement system was a fringe-projection system, custom built for the specific requirements of wing metrology. It can e.g. easily detect waviness of 0.1 mm and its noise limit is about 10 micrometres. The nominal field of view was 1280x800 mm², making it perfectly suited for measurements in inter-rib spaces of the BLADE wings. It can be adjusted to any orientation desired, and its position can be registered with laser tracker assistance. This made it possible to locate unconnected surface segments correctly in 3-D space, thus eliminating the need for large overlaps between surface sub-areas. However, we have also shown that very good results are achievable without laser tracker assistance by ""stitching"" of sub-areas together into one combined data set for the entire wing tip surface of 9x2 m².

The applicants have decades of experience in full-field non-contact optical metrology, including three years of collaboration within the current BLADE consortium under call JTI-CS-2010-05-SFWA-03-004. The business infrastructure for a successful effort was already in place, as are evaluation methods which were further refined during the current call and had reached a high degree of maturity by the scheduled start time of the flight test metrology campaign.