Adiabatic Calorimetry as Support to the Certification of High-Purity Liquid Reference Materials

The certification of high-purity liquid reference materials is supported by several analytical techniques (e.g., gas chromatography, liquid chromatography, Karl Fischer coulometry, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, differential scanning calorimetry, adiabatic calorimetry). Most of them provide information on a limited set of specific impurities present in the sample (indirect methods). Adiabatic calorimetry [1] complementarily provides the overall molar fraction of impurities with sensitivity down to few μmol · mol−1 without giving any information about the nature of the impurities present in the sample (direct method). As the combination of adiabatic calorimetry with one (or more than one) indirect chemical techniques was regarded as an optimal methodology, NMi VSL developed an adiabatic calorimetry facility for the purity determination of high-purity liquid reference materials [2]. Within the framework of collaboration with NMIJ, a benzene-certified reference material (NMIJ CRM 4002) from NMIJ was analyzed by adiabatic calorimetry at NMi VSL. The results of this measurement are reported in this paper. Good agreement with the NMIJ-certified purity value (99.992 ± 0.003) cmol · mol−1 was found. The influence of different data analysis approaches (e.g., extrapolation functions, melting ranges) on the measurement results is reported. The uncertainty of the measured purity was estimated.