National Interlaboratory Comparison in Scope of Relative Humidity in the Range from 11 %rh to 95 %rh at 23

The goal of interlaboratory comparisons is to verify the competence of accredited or non-accredited laboratories, including verification of the reported measurement uncertainties, whenever possible. An interlaboratory comparison consists of measurement results of a laboratory and a reference laboratory which is competent to run the comparison and provides traceability at the required uncertainty level. In Turkey, the demand for an interlaboratory comparison in the humidity field increased drastically in parallel to an increasing number of accredited laboratories in this field. Therefore, a national interlaboratory comparison in the scope of relative humidity in the range between 11 %rh and 95 %rh at was initiated by TUBITAK UME in 2011. Two hygrometers were calibrated at TUBITAK UME in the above-mentioned range and characterized in terms of long-term stability, temperature dependence, and hysteresis. One of the hygrometers is used throughout this comparison. The second one was kept aside as a backup device in case of a malfunction of the first device. Organization and evaluation of the interlaboratory comparison in the scope of relative humidity were performed according to the EN ISO/IEC 17043:2010 "Conformity assessment-general requirements for proficiency testing" among thirteen national laboratories. Evaluation of comparison results are performed by normalized error analysis. It was found that among the 95 realized points of comparison, 85 (89 %) had and only 10 (11 %) had E > 1.