Chemical powders are supplied by various companies with MSDS & CoA. Are these companies approving for accuracy and validity of MSDS & CoA from an organization/ agency? If so, could anyone provide the details? How does one come to know if a MSDS & CoA is true or fake? Do these MSDS & CoA follow some standard rules or norms?
What do you mean by "true or fake" of an MSDS? Suppliers of chemicals provides MSDS and data in the certificate usually following a standard measurement procedure. If it is serious there is also information about the details of the procedure how the data were determined which are usually based on well known and documented methods or even standards.
In our case we followed the given procedure by one supplier with our own instrumentation to "verify" the CoA given values. In addition, we provided samples of the material to external labs asking them to follow the same procedures. It came out that the measured values were about 50% above the value given in the CoA. That is, in my opinion, really good for the company because they promised just "more than X", but it was difficult for us because 50% above X influenced our measurements enormously.
Best regards
Peter
I mean reliability of % given in CoA/MSDS. e.g. 99.999% pure PbO etc......
MSDS are ususally written by the supplier and not checked by any authority, but they have to be writtent according to some local regulations. An US or EU MSDS will not have exactly the same content and one should always use a MSDS which is valid for the country and up to date since health and saftey regulations for some chemicals can change very fast. They are expected to be accurate on the safety risks (but do no take it for granted) but nothing more, compostitions are often relatively generic and not always complete.
CoA are also in general provided by the supplier and not checked by anybody else, it can be that the supplier request another company to perfor the control of their products, in this case it is generally documented in the CoA. In some cases the supplier has an ISO17025 accreditation, which would mean they have validated calibration and measurement procedures that will allow them to provide measurement results and uncertainty values that one should be able to trust. Also in a CoA one reports only what has been measured. If an element/chemicals is not on the CoA this means that it what not checked, but not that is absent.
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