Why is calibration important in transportation?

Transcript

Hi. My name is Jeff Gust and I'm the Chief Corporate Metrologist for Fluke Corporation in Everett, Washington.

Rather than being in a laboratory, I thought we'd travel around the greater Seattle area today to explore some of the many modes of transport that are available and think about the critical measurements that are utilized to keep them up and running.

When we commute in our cars or take a train or fly in an airplane or even take a ferry boat to get from point A to point B, we don't really think about the thousands of measurements that are involved in getting us safely to our destination.

In the Second Industrial Revolution, one of the key concepts was parts interchangeability. And Henry Ford took that concept and built it into his assembly line. He partnered with C.E. Johansson, the inventor of a length standard called the Gauge Block, and they founded the Ford C.E Johansson company to build reference standards to calibrate their assembly line.

So, we’re just passing the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington right now and it makes you think about measurements associated with airplanes. Elevation measurements and speed measurements on airplanes are measured as a function of pressure. These pressure measurements are converted into meters of altitude or feet of altitude or in kilometers per hour or miles per hour and speed and all of those are done by what's called an air data test set to calibrate the instrumentation in the cockpit. And, just about every single air data test set is calibrated by Fluke pressure standards.

The ferries in Washington state, transport over 24 million people per year. They're propelled by a 3.5-megawatt, 4,160-volt motor. The maintenance staff use a wide variety of Fluke industrial test tools to measure the voltage, current, and temperature of these propulsion systems.

Rail systems have many transducers that convert mechanical quantities like force, speed, and acceleration into electrical quantities and as a result there is a large array of test instrumentation on trains to monitor these measurements throughout the day.

I invite you all to take a moment to appreciate all the measurements, big and small, that enable us to go about our days with confidence so that we can trust our transportation system.

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