Crash-test dummies, yarn-spinning machines, and steel girders in bridges. What do they have in common? Look inside them all and you find transducers, devices that measure the forces that push, pull, weigh upon, and slam into them. But transducers also have something in common: Until recently, it was difficult to calibrate them in all but the simplest sense. Now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are changing that.

If you think of any device with moving parts, it’s likely that it’s larger, bulkier, or heavier than it needs to be, and, therefore, probably requires more energy than it might. That’s because engineers have lacked a good way to accurately measure dynamic forces—those that change over time—and so they over-design to compensate. It is difficult to standardize manufacturing and testing processes because measurements made with different transducer models generally do not agree with each other. Fast-changing forces like the shock waves felt in explosions and crashes are particularly difficult to measure accurately.

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