Practical revision of error separation technique to improve cylindricity measurement

•A cylindricity measurement design with error separation technique is proposed.•The procedure is performed using a commercially available instrument.•Step-by-step mathematical processing with assumptions and their impact is given.•The uncertainty budget described shows the accuracy attainable. Theoretic aspects of error separation techniques or reversal methods are widely described in literature to remove the instrument component and isolate the desire characteristic. However, the mathematical step by step procedure strongly depend of the measurand and measurements; and is not frequently found. This paper proposes an approach to design and process cylindricity measurements of cylindrical standards, through an error separation technique; given a detailed mathematical development and assumptions, and the impact of the later ones in the measurement uncertainty. Also, an analysis of the uncertainty estimation budget is made, through which the improvement of the method can be observed.