NIST engineer Kumar Arumugam examines the tabletop Kibble balance before its delivery to the U.S. Army.
Credit: J. Lee/NIST
Bringing its cutting-edge invention to the larger world for the first time, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has delivered a portable and superaccurate tabletop instrument for measuring mass to the U.S. Army, potentially revolutionizing critical measurements in a variety of applications, from weighing aircraft components to delivering exact doses of medicine.
NIST delivered the mass measurement instrument, known as a tabletop Kibble balance, to the U.S. Army Redstone Arsenal near Huntsville, Alabama, in early April. This marks the first time in the U.S. that a tabletop Kibble balance has been put into use outside of NIST.
“This is the first Kibble balance that is out in the wild,” said Stephan Schlamminger, NIST physicist. “The Army are good early adopters of this technology because they have a measurement lab and they have trained staff. This is the best type of place to test these devices in the field.”
Democratizing Precision Mass Measurements
In the U.S., NIST has been at the forefront of worldwide efforts to redefine the metric system, known as the International System of Units (SI). In May 2019, the scientific community changed how we define the kilogram, which is the basic unit of mass. In the past, the kilogram was defined by a physical object — a metal cylinder kept in France. The current definition is based on fundamental properties of nature that are always the same, such as the speed of light or the charge of the electron. Unlike traditional balances that rely on phys ..
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