Within Europe there are emerging national metrology institutes (NMIs) and designated (DIs) that provide the highest order in the traceability chain within their country for photometry and radiometry, but who are not able to fulfil the needs of stakeholders’ for the measurement and traceability of particular quantities / parameters due to a lack of relevant metrological expertise. This project will enable emerging NMIs and DIs to develop their metrological knowledge and expertise concentrated in those metrology fields, which are of major interest for the stakeholders (industry and society) in their countries with respect to smart specialisation in the field of photometry and radiometry. This will be achieved through the delivery of web-based seminars, training lectures and hands-on laboratory experience to support the development of the metrology infrastructures within these countries, thus enabling a better and more effective linkage between the participating NMIs and the stakeholders to address their needs.

Need
Reliable measurement capability in photometry and radiometry is required to support industry, regulation and research related to lasers and LED power, lighting and safe illumination, the optical appearance of products, fibre optics, photovoltaics and solar cells, to name a few.
Within the EURAMET Technical Committee for photometry and radiometry (TC-PR) there are emerging NMIs and DIs that provide the highest order within the traceability chain for photometry and radiometry, but who are not able to fulfil the needs of the stakeholder within their countries. Furthermore, mainly due to a lack of resources (primarily labour) and lack of expertise, they are also not able to participate or only to participate in a very limited manner in European funded research projects e.g. within EMPIR. Within this project an emerging NMI is defined as an NMI which cannot fulfil the requirements of its country in that specific metrology area, whereas a highly developed (highly experienced) NMI is an NMI, which is able to provide teaching and training for the emerging NMIs in specific metrology areas. At the TC-PR meetings held in recent years, both the necessity to develop metrological expertise to address the specific stakeholder needs as well the lack possibilities to develop this expertise, became more and more clear. Therefore, a new process was started within the TC-PR. Since 2018, there have been yearly workshops, collocated with the TC-PR Annual Meetings, on support, collaboration and coordination (SCC) within the TC-PR [1, 2]. This process started in 2018 with a workshop on the identification of the specific needs of each TC member with respect to the stakeholders’ requirements within their country. Each TC member briefly presented their needs, drawn from stakeholder consultations and needs identified within their countries. This workshop series had the aim to address the specific needs of each NMI and DI within the TC-PR, especially for the emerging ones. At the end, a structured workplan for the development and support for smart specialisation of specific topics in the emerging NMIs/DIs was developed. The topics identified as the most urgent where emerging NMIs/DIs needed to specialise and improve their expertise were photometry, spectrophotometry and appearance, fibre optics and photovoltaics. In the context of this project, smart specialisation refers to the decision of NMIs/DIs to develop or improve capabilities in particular fields based on stakeholders’ needs and a coordinated European approach (through EURAMET TC-PR) to identifying the priority areas.

Objective(s)
The overall aim of the project is to enable emerging NMIs/DIs to develop their metrological knowledge and expertise concentrated in areas that are important to their specific needs of the stakeholders within their region with respect to smart specialisation in the field of photometry and radiometry.

The specific objectives of the project are:

1. To provide training and transfer knowledge to enable emerging NMIs/DIs to develop their metrological knowledge and expertise in the field of photometry and radiometry to support smart-specialisation (i) under consideration of the specific national and regional stakeholder needs, (ii) based on the identified stakeholder needs presented in workshops on support, collaboration and coordination held within the TC-PR, (iii) by improving the linkage between NMIs and stakeholders based on enhanced expertise and (iv) by building mutual trust between the project partners.

Results

First, the TC-PR has responded to the needs expressed by the NMIs/DIs based on consultations with their stakeholders by facilitating the development of a structured plan, which will be implemented in this project to bring into the NMIs/DIs (Aalto, BIM, CNAM, CSIC, GUM, INM, Metrosert and TUBITAK) the required specialised expertise to fulfil the requests from the stakeholders. A similarly structured approach will be used for the four identified priority fields of photometry (P&R calibration of LEDs, safety of light sources), appearance (gloss, colour reflectometry, reflectometry), fibre optics and photovoltaics. Emerging NMIs/DIs will only receive training in those fields / sub-fields where they need to specialise, and which have been identified as a priority for them. The training will start with web-based seminars for the relevant partners organised by an experienced NMI/DI. This will be followed by two weeks training at an experienced NMI/DI, which will include theoretical and practical lectures at their facilities. In the final stage of the training, experts from an experienced NMI/DI will visit the relevant partners to provide on-site training at the partners’ sites. Finally, the success of the various training activities will be evaluated by the investigation of measurement results achieved by the emerging NMIs/DIs in the relevant sub-field in either an interlaboratory comparison, interlaboratory pilot study or laboratory tests, as appropriate.
The web-based lectures, the reports and documents produced within this project will be available not only to the project partners, but also to the other members of the TC-PR. These will include a compendium of web-based seminars and a compendium of training courses for capacity building within the TC-PR, as well as a report describing the knowledge transfer within the TC-PR. The materials developed within this project will also be available for the currently planned EURAMET remote learning platform, if suitable. Although not directly a specific objective of this project, the capacity building materials established within the project will also be available within the countries of the partner NMIs/DIs, in order to transfer knowledge to non-NMI actors. Furthermore, it is expected that the project partners from emerging NMIs/DIs will gain expertise so that they will be able to join future European metrology projects, and that other NMIs may participate in the knowledge transfer process in the future. This is expected to improve the connection between the NMIs and the respective customers in their countries. There will be a follow-up process within the TC-PR, based on the experience gained in this project, hence the entire TC, and thus the whole European metrology in the fields of photometry and radiometry, will be strengthened. Also, in the future the process of smart specialisation will continue, the mutual trust in capabilities will be strengthened, firstly between the project partners, and later between all members of the TC-PR. Finally, the approach to smart specialisation and stakeholder linkage developed in this project may serve as a role model for other TCs.