Analytical balance: operation, verification and uncertainty

Anyone who weighs. Analysts, technicians and the quality staff who write the balance-check procedure they follow.

Practical throughout — delegates run the checks on a balance during the day rather than watching them described.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• How it works

  Electromagnetic force restoration, and why that explains the failure modes

• Installation

  Bench, draught, vibration, temperature and static — the environment as part of the result

• Intermediate checks

  Repeatability, eccentricity, sensitivity and linearity between calibrations

• Minimum weight

  The smallest sample you may legitimately weigh, and how to establish it

• Weights

  OIML classes, handling, storage and the recalibration of your own check weights

• Uncertainty

  Building weighing uncertainty and where it sits in the overall budget

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Set up and run intermediate balance checks with defensible acceptance criteria.
2. 02Establish a minimum weight for your balance and apply it to sample sizes.
3. 03Recognise the environmental causes behind an unstable reading rather than re-taring through them.
4. 04Estimate the weighing contribution to a result’s uncertainty.

A gravimetric result can be no better than the weighing under it, and a balance calibrated annually can drift, be knocked or be sited badly on any of the other three hundred and sixty-four days.

Minimum weight is the quiet one. Laboratories routinely weigh samples far smaller than their balance can support at the precision the method assumes, and nothing in the result flags it.

Delivered over 1 day, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.