Drift Eliminating Designs for Non-Simultaneous Comparison Calibrations

The effects of drift on calibrations carried out by comparison have been studied at the National Institute of Standards and Technology for many years, and a number of strategies have been introduced to combat these effects. One strategy, the use of comparison designs which are inherently immune to linear drift, was developed specifically for mass comparison measurements. These techniques, developed for simultaneous comparisons, are extended to the case of non-simultaneous comparisons, such as gage block calibrations, where each artifact is measured separately, and the comparison is made mathematically from the individual measurements.