Purity assessment for providing primary standards for elemental determination – a snap shot of international comparability

Abstract.

An inter-laboratory study was performed by some National Metrology Institutes in order to take a snap shot of the comparability and the capability of performing purity assessments of high purity materials as needed for providing national standards for elemental determination. The measurand was defined as the value of the sum of the mass fractions of Ag, Al, Cu, Fe, Pb and Zn in the bulk of a high purity nickel material and the interim results for the six individual impurities. Whereas for the analytes Ag, Al, Cu and Fe there was no agreement within the target uncertainty of 30%, agreement could be achieved for Pb and Zn. The discrepancies observed for the individual analytes resulted in a variation of a factor of 8 of the reported values for the impurity of nickel with respect to the six defined metallic analytes. The reference measurements using IDMS and for Al using GD-MS confirmed the lower reported values.