One of the great revolutions in metrology in chemistry has been the understanding of the need to quote an appropriate measurement uncertainty with a result. For some time, a standard deviation determined under not particularly well-defined conditions was considered a reasonable adjunct to a measurement result, and multiplying by the appropriate Student’s t value gave the 95% confidence interval. But knowing that in a long run of experiments repeated under identical conditions 95% of the 95% confidence intervals would include the population mean did not answer the fundamental question of how good the result was. This became evident as international trade burgeoned and more and more discrepancies in measurement results and disagreements between trading partners came to light. To determine if two measurements of ostensibly the same measurand on the same material give results that are equivalent, they must be traceable to the same metrological reference and have stated measurement uncertainties. How to achieve that comparability is the subject of this chapter and the next. When making a chemical measurement by taking a certain amount of the test material, working it up in a form that can be analyzed, calibrating the instrument, and performing the measurement, analysts understand that there will be some doubt about the result. Contributions to uncertainty derive from each step in the analysis, and even from the basis on which the analysis is carried out. An uncertainty budget documents the history of the assessment of the measurement uncertainty of a result, and it is the outcome of the process of identifying and quantifying uncertainty. Although the client may only receive the fruits of this process as (value ± expanded uncertainty), accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025 requires the laboratory to document how the uncertainty is estimated. Estimates of plutonium sources highlight the importance of uncertainty. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates there are about 700 tonnes of plutonium in the world. The uncertainty of measurement of plutonium is of the order of 0.1%, so even if all the plutonium were in one place, when analyzed the uncertainty would be 700 kg (1000 kg = 1 tonne). Seven kilograms of plutonium makes a reasonable bomb.
Estimation of the Measurement Uncertainty of a Gravimetric Analytical Procedure Applied in Fluvial Hydrosedimentology - A Didactic Example for Metrology in Chemistry Education in Technical and Undergraduate Courses