Experimental validation of FEA modelling of touch trigger probes

Abstract

The authors have previously proposed the use of finite element method (FEM) for the modeling of coordinate measuring machine probes. Whilst the modeling results have been published previously, this paper presents the detailed experimental validation to compare the FEM and experimental results. The comparison shows that the agreement is generally good with probing contacts at lower latitudes near the equator of the reference sphere. The differences between the modeling and experimental results become large at higher latitudes. This is believed to be mainly caused by the sliding effects which occur during probing contact in the experiments.