Quantification of sulphur in copper and copper alloys by GDMS and LA-ICP-MS, demonstrating metrological traceability to the international system of units

The quantification of the sulphur mass fraction in pure copper and copper alloys by GDMS and LA-ICP-MS revealed a lack of traceability mainly due to a lack of suitable certified reference materials for calibrating the instruments. Within this study GDMS and LA-ICP-MS were applied as routine analytical tools to quantify sulphur in copper samples by applying reference materials as calibrators, which were characterized for their sulphur mass fraction by IDMS beforehand. Different external calibration strategies were applied including a matrix cross type calibration. Both techniques with all calibration strategies were validated by using certified reference materials (others than those used for calibration) and good agreement with the reference values was achieved except for the matrix cross type calibration, for which the agreement was slightly worse. All measurement results were accompanied by an uncertainty statement. For GDMS, the relative expanded (k = 2) measurement uncertainty ranged from 3% to 7%, while for LA-ICP-MS it ranged from 11% to 33% when applying matrix-matched calibration in the sulphur mass fraction range between 25 mg kg(-1) and 1300 mg kg(-1). For cross-type calibration the relative expanded (k = 2) measurement uncertainty need to be increased to at least 12% for GDMS and to at least 54% for LA-ICP-MS to yield metrological compatibility with the reference values. The so obtained measurement results are traceable to the international system of units (SI) via IDMS reference values, which is clearly illustrated by the unbroken chain of calibrations in the metrological traceability scheme.

Automated summary

The quantification of the sulphur mass fraction in pure copper and copper alloys by GDMS and LA-ICP-MS showed a lack of traceability due to insufficient suitable certified reference materials for calibrating the instruments. Different external calibration strategies were applied and validated using certified reference materials, with good agreement achieved except for the matrix cross type calibration which had slightly worse agreement. The measurement results obtained are traceable to the international system of units (SI) via IDMS reference values, demonstrating metrological compatibility.