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Paper VST-ThM8
Overview of Two CCM Key Comparisons in Low Pressure (1 Pa - 1000 Pa) - How Good are MEMS Sensors as Transfer Standards?

Thursday, November 1, 2001, 10:40 am, Room 125

Session: Pressure & Flow Measurement Instruments & Their Calibration
Presenter: A.P. Miiller, National Institute of Standards and Technology
Correspondent: Click to Email

This talk will provide an overview of two recent CCM key comparisons of primary pressure standards operating in the range 1 Pa to 1000 Pa at eight National Metrology Institutes (NMIs). The objective of the two comparisons, one in absolute pressure the other in differential pressure at a nominal line pressure of 100 kPa, was to determine the degrees of equivalence of the measurement standards. An earlier comprehensive study@footnote 1@ of low-pressure transducers showed that no one type of transducer could meet all requirements for the transfer standard. Consequently the transfer standard package was constructed using four high-precision pressure transducers, two capacitance diaphragm gauges to provide high resolution at low pressures and two (MEMS) resonant silicon gauges to provide calibration stability. Two nominally identical transfer packages were used to reduce the time required for the measurements, with Package A being circulated among laboratories in the European region (IMGC, NPL-UK, and PTB) and Package B being circulated among laboratories in the Asia-Pacific region (CSIRO, KRISS, MSL-NZ, and NPL-I). The results obtained with different transfer packages were normalized by using data obtained from simultaneous calibrations of the two packages at the pilot laboratory (NIST). The degrees of equivalence of the measurement standards were determined in two ways, deviations from key comparison reference values (KCRVs) and pairwise differences between these deviations. Apart from a few results identified as outliers, the measurement standards were generally found to be equivalent relative to the KCRVs, though some additional instances of nonequivalence were observed between given pairs of standards. The results revealed no significant relative bias between different measurement methods used by the NMIs to realize their standards. @FootnoteText@@footnote 1@ Miiller A. P., "Measurement performance of high-accuracy low-pressure transducers", Metrologia, 1999, 36 (6), 617-621.