Ethanol/water solutions as certified reference materials for breath alcohol analyzer calibration

The Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), Germany, has issued a series of large volume ethanol in water certified reference materials (CRMs), primarily developed for the calibration of evidential breath alcohol analyzers in Germany. The certified parameter is the ethanol mass concentration at 20 °C. When used in a wet bath simulator, the solutions deliver gas samples that meet the requirements set by the Organization of Legal Metrology for calibration of breathalyzers. The materials were prepared gravimetrically by spiking of ethanol into water in single 5 L units. A complete uncertainty budget for the preparation process has been established. The purity of the commercial ethanol stock solution was identified to be the main source of uncertainty. For stability and homogeneity measurements and for the verification of the gravimetric mass concentration of the CRMs, a robust high-precision gas chromatography, with flame-ionization detection method for ethanol determination in aqueous samples was developed and validated. The good performance of this method has been demonstrated in several international comparisons organized by the Consultative Committee for Amount of Substance—Metrology in Chemistry at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.     

Smooth distribution function estimation for lifetime distributions using Szasz–Mirakyan operators

Annals of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics - In this paper, we introduce a new smooth estimator for continuous distribution functions on the positive real half-line using...     

Rapid empirical calculation of the first (n or π) ionization potential of organic molecules

The first ionization potential of an organic molecule containing electrons in nonbonding or π-type molecular orbitals can rapidly be calculated using parameters describing physical and chemical effects. These parameters include effective polarizability, resonance stabilization of a cation, π- and σ-charges, and electronegativity and are directly calculated from the structure of the compound. Correlation analyses with the first ionization potentials were carried out on various data sets classified into five groups to cover a wide range of organic molecules. The equations thus obtained were integrated into a system that automatically calculates the ionization potential of an organic compound from a connection table as obtained by a graphic input program. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.