ROUND-ROBIN EXPERIMENTS FOR COMPARISON AND EVALUATION OF ANALYTICAL METHODS FOR THE DETERMINATION OF EMISSIONS FROM HIGH-POWER LASER MATERIAL PROCESSING

The characterization of gaseous and aerosol emissions and also workpla ce immissions generated during high-power laser processing is one of t he main work areas of the International Working Group (IWG) 1 'Fumes' in the Eurolaser project EU 643 'Safety in the Industrial Applications of Lasers.' To investigate the emissions and workplace immissions, su itable experimental set-ups, sampling devices and analytical technique s must be available, and the techniques must be well mastered, Various experimental set-ups, sampling and analysis methods have been used by the institutes and laboratories participating in the project, In orde r to compare the results of emission and immission measurements carrie d out by different institutes, the quality of the sampling and analysi s methods has to be ascertained. To meet these demands, IWG 1 decided, as a first step, to carry out a series of round robin exercises. This is an ongoing programme and the results of the round robin experiment s on the chemical analysis of inorganic and organic compounds, expecte d to be formed during high-power laser processing of various materials , are presented in this paper. For many of the compounds analysed, the results showed significant variations between the participants and be tter agreement of the analytical methods used by the different partici pants is required for adequate comparisons of analytical results. The round robin experiments proved to be a valuable tool for self-evaluati on among the participants and may in the future facilitate comparisons of the results obtained.