Determination of Assigned Values for Cadmium,Cobalt and Manganese in Drinking Water Proficiency Testing

In proficiency tests the selection of an appropriate assigned value is one of the most critical points. Determination of the assigned value for proficiency test can be done in 2 ways: based on reference value and consensus value. The use of such a consensus value as an assigned value is a commonplace in proficiency testing, because there is seldom at present a cost effective alternative. However, the consensus value has a weakness in that it could be significantly different from the true value due largely inexperienced laboratories. Therefore in this work, the reference values were used as the assigned values for all analytes of interest. The reference values in spiked drinking water samples were produced by the Metrology in Chemistry Laboratory of Research Center for Chemistry - Indonesian Institute of Sciences (RCChem-LIPI) with traceable to SI units through standard solutions from the National Institute Standard and Technology, USA. The reference values of cobalt and manganese were obtained by measurement using two from three comparable methods of Graphite Furnace-Atomic Absorption Spectrometry (GF-AAS), Inductively Coupled Plasma-Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES) and Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) while that for cadmium was obtained by a primary method of ICP-Isotope Dilution Mass Spectrometry (ICP-IDMS).The obtained reference values were used to evaluate the laboratory performance result in a proficiency testing scheme of cadmium, cobalt and manganese in drinking water which was provided in 2014. All fifty nine laboratories reported cadmium and cobalt at low concentration levels which were about more than 82% showed satisfactory performance results. Similarly, the results of manganese were also comparable at high level concentrations.