Today’s production industry has to face considerable challenges. Decentralised andcross-linked production processes lead to a highly complex production control and aworldwide financial crisis causes drastic movements in demand. To succeed in businessunder these conditions, production needs to be transparent. One key factor to increasetransparency is the management of measurement processes. The management of measurementprocesses focuses not only on the measurement process itself that enables the decision onthe conformity of a measurand but, beyond that, it considers the acquisition of knowledgethroughout the production process, its validation, processing and feedback into theprocess chain. With proof of measurement process capability, the determination of theoptimal trade-off among measuring and production process, the adjustment of optimalworking points and tolerances is achieved. The management of measurement processes allowsobtaining a maximum benefit from metrology under the consideration of technical,organisational and economical boundary conditions.

The type of data treatment is different depending on whether the comparison, inparticular a key comparison of the MRA (mutual recognition agreement), is of thehierarchical or non-hierarchical type. This term does not mean a possible hierarchy amongthe participant laboratories; nor, in the opposite sense, a non-hierarchy among them likein the MRA key comparisons, but an intrinsic characteristic of the comparison measurand ordesign. It is a typical hierarchical comparison when the comparisoninvolves artefact standards. In this case, the summary parameters of the comparison arehierarchically higher than the input dataset. In case of non-hierarchicalcomparisons, the summary parameters are generally not of a hierarchicallyhigher level than the input dataset, because the comparison dataset can be considereddrawn from a single super-population. This happens, when a single standard is circulatedfor measurement; when the measured samples are all drawn from a single batch of areference material; when the standards are all realisations of a single condition – namelya physical or chemical state. This paper will discuss in detail these two categories.

Efficient traffic enforcement requires a system characterized by regulations wheremetrology must have a significant role. It is important for competent authorities andmanufacturers to have efficient measurement traceability within the framework ofconformity assessment of instruments available on the market. Therefore a growing interestlies in the role of metrological decisions in conformity assessment, particularly wheremeasurements are in support of safety and health, such as in road safety. This paperfocuses on the role of Portuguese Legal Metrology in the field of road safety, itemphasizes the relevance of metrological control of some measuring instruments in thefield of the National Program Strategic Plan for Road Safety, as a way to prevent andmonitor the crash rate.

The measurement of the car exhausts plays an important role in many countries all overthe world. Often, national legislation lays down limits to preserve the environment and,in addition, special regulations exist for the metrological control of exhaust gasanalyzers. In the 90s, opacimetry was introduced as a fast and simple measuring techniqueto qualify the exhaust systems of cars equipped with Diesel engines. However, for moderncars equipped with soot reduction systems, conventional opacimetry reaches its limits.Therefore, new exhaust gas analyzers enter the market and, in parallel, the regulations inmany countries will be modified. In terms of traceability, corresponding nationalstandards must be developed for setting up a traceability chain for this new kind ofinstrument. For this reason, research is carried out with the aim of implementing particlecounter standards for aerosols. In some countries, new set-ups are under constructionwhich may lead to future intercomparisons. Today thousands of opacimeters are still inuse, yet new instruments should comply with some of the given requirements in order toallow a smooth transition from one technique to the other. In other words, new instrumentsshould combine the principles of two different “worlds”: opacimetry and particle counting.The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the development of new exhaust gasanalyzers as well as of new national standards and new regulations in this field.

The advent of charge-coupled devices (CCD) has significantly extended the horizons offull-field measurement methods in many fields of fundamental and applied sciences,including fluid flow dynamics. One of the major applications of imaging sensors in fluidmechanics is the Digital Particle Image Velocimetry (DPIV), which is a non-invasive, fullfield optical measuring technique. Due to recent advances in image processing methods, andin digital imaging, laser and optics DPIV has become a dominant tool for obtainingvelocity information about fluid motion. On the other hand, over the last years,developments in micro- and nanofluidic systems have promised a shrinking of thedesktop-sized chemical and biological devices to microscale size, so a detailedinvestigation of the behaviour of flow inside these microdevices is essential for theoptimum design of microsystems, as well as for an understanding of flow dynamics in micronscales. In this work, the advances in visualization and quantitative measurements of flowvelocity measurements are reviewed and explained.

In today’s modern world, plastics are used for a variety of everyday applications fromplastic shopping bags to medicinal applications, but most of these plastics are resistantto environmental influences such as humidity and microbial attack. The ecological problemwe now face in our landfills is the large volume of non-biodegradable plastics, which hasmade the development of biodegradable plastics an urgent matter. Because of thissituation, the Chemical Metrology Group of NMISA (National Metrology Institute of SouthAfrica) has embarked on a collaborative effort with the Fibre and Polymer TechnologyDepartment of KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) in Sweden to develop methods for theanalysis of biodegradable polymers. During the project, commercial and research samplesare analysed with various techniques, such as Pyrolysis-GC-MS, GPC, FTIR, SEM, TGA,TGA-FTIR and DSC. The aim is primarily to evaluate what information can be obtained byPyrolysis-GC-MC and FTIR-TGA with respect to thermal properties and degradation products.Currently polylactide (PLA) is the focus of many studies and it is one of the mostpromising degradable polymers. One trend is to improve the properties of PLA throughaddition of different nanofillers. In this work polylactide nanocomposites are made byblending polylactide (PLA) with zinc oxide, titanium dioxide, halloysite (aluminosilicate)or surface modified montmorillonite (phyllosilicate). The materials are characterized byscanning electron microscopy (SEM) and DSC. The thermal stability and resulting thermaldegradation products are analysed by TGA and Py-GC-MS. The results especially show theinfluence of nanoparticle surface modification on the degradation product pattern.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have become strongly promising nano-particles for developingnovel smart polymer matrix nanocomposites to satisfy the ever increasing designrequirements of the recent avenues of space industry and other special structuralapplications. The objective of this paper is to investigate the influence of doped anddispersed CNTs in polymer matrix on its intrinsic properties. Three different types ofpolymers; polyvinylchloride (PVC), polymethylemethacrylate (PMMA), and polystyrene (PS)were subjected to this experimental investigation. CNTs/polymer matrix composites with acontent ratio of CNTs up to 5% by weight were synthesized in lab. The nanocomposites werethen characterized by measuring their mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties. Inaddition, thermo gravimetric analysis (TGA), Fourier transform infra red spectroscopy(FTIR), and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) were applied, and the results are presentedand discussed. It can be generally concluded that both PMMA and PS polymers disclosed muchbetter matching ability and cross linking ability with the interweaving CNTs than the PVC.Both PMMA and PS polymers may thus be nominated for further extension of the investigationto cover a wider range of CNTs content ratios in an endeavour towards searching formaximum specific performance properties of such nanocomposites.

The main purpose of the paper is to describe the construction and performance of a newand novel Silver and Copper point system that combines a conventional ingot of silver orcopper in a graphite crucible, with a specially designed heat dewar or heat siphon to forma single entity. Furthermore, to add above this entity a heated collar to exactlycompensate for heat losses upwards and the stem conduction effects of the thermometerbeing calibrated. The overall construction contains no glass parts, is rugged, compact andtransportable. Its performance is similar to large quartz clad cells in floor standingheat pipe apparatus at a fraction of the size and cost.

In the building domain, components or equipment are often subjected to severeenvironmental conditions. In order to predict the reliability and the life-time of suchequipment, accelerated life testing can be carried out. Severe conditions are applied toaccelerate the ageing of the components and the reliability at nominal conditions is thendeduced considering that these nominal conditions are not constant but stochastic. In thispaper, the accelerated life testing of photovoltaic modules is carried out at severemodule temperature levels. The module power losses are monitored and the limit state isdetermined when a threshold power is reached. The stochastic data and the reliability aresimulated during a period of twenty years. Finally, the life time of the component isevaluated.

A common measurement model for a gas operated piston-cylinder based pressure standardeffective area is the well known integral equation formulation originally developed byDadson of the NPL. However a problem with directly applying this exact mathematical modelis that it cannot be easily cast into a functional form suitable for application of theGuide to the expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM) which is reliant on theconcept of sensitivity coefficients without various simplifications. In this paper, weexamine the standard approximations that are currently necessary in order to directlyapply the GUM for a pressure standard effective area uncertainty determination. We alsocompare and contrast this to the exact effective area uncertainty results obtained throughthe direct application of the Monte Carlo Method (MCM) which has recently been publishedas Supplement 1 to the GUM. Based on these investigations we also draw some preliminaryconclusions on the relative merits on the extent to which the shape of the piston andcylinder radii and whose uncertainties may vary along the engagement length of thepiston-cylinder may be modeled and incorporated into a piston-cylinder’s effective areauncertainty calculation.