Home-made software development for optimizing the uncertainty evaluation of silver fixed point cell used for practical realization of ITS-90

In order to enhance the availability of facilities in the field of high temperature contact thermometry in European emerging National Metrology Institutes (NMIs) and Designated Institutes (DIs), where access to types of facilities is currently limited an EMPIR Research Potential Project named Eura- Thermal has been launched. This project develop skills and tools for less experienced NMIs/DIs in order to acquire the required knowledge and expertise in temperature metrology. Within the frame of the work package dedicated to contact thermometry, the work is focused on the silver fixed point cell which is one of the fixed points defined by the International Temperature Scale of 1990 (ITS-90). In this way, the traceability for the practical realization of the kelvinin accordance with the International System of Units (SI) would be provided with the lowest uncertainties. The home-made software has been developed in Lab View language which includes and standardizes the validated measurement procedure. Moreover, the software provides a practical tool for the evaluation of uncertainties according to the “Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurements". This enables to quantifying the main component contribution on uncertainty budget during the realization of the Silver fixed point cell measurements. Performance and usefulness of the software and evaluation of uncertainty will be discussed in this paper. This work is funded through the European Metrology Programme for Innovation and Research (EMPIR) project “RPT05 - EuraThermal”. EMPIR is jointly funded by the EMPIR participating countries within EURAMET and the European Union