6 Simple Ways to Improve Your Measuring Accuracy with Calibrations

Efficient and reliable calibration processes are critical for the maintenance of high-accuracy measurement devices. Regularly scheduled calibrations can make a significant contribution to increasing overall product quality, saving you time by eliminating the need for non-essential rework and minimizing potential waste.

1. Keep Your Sensors Safe Between Use

Keeping your sensors safe between use is vital for limiting the frequency of calibrations required in the first place. It also helps prevent damage and unknown safety hazards.

Sensors should be kept in amenable environments while in storage or transport, with batteries stored separately in bags or trays to avoid short circuit. Notably, leaving batteries in bundles where they come into contact with each other is highly risky. Doing so may result in a short circuit and small-scale explosions or fire hazards.

2. Only Use Sensors for Their Specified Purpose and Tolerances

Calibration sensors are made for a specific purpose and can easily be damaged by a lack of attention to their natural capabilities and tolerances. As a rule, you should not use your sensors for any application other than their intended use, and they should only be used in this manner by trained personnel.

Sensors have notable environmental tolerances that should not be exceeded, such as limitations on temperature and humidity depending on the type of sensor. Additionally, equipment (when applicable) must be plugged into appropriate electrical outlets that are in accordance with local codes and ordinances.

Remember to inspect your sensors for damage before each use, and do not use any equipment that appears damaged or operates abnormally.

3. Use Industry Experts to Perform Calibrations

If an instrument is not calibrated to a high standard, it is likely to result in inaccurate readings and subsequently harsh consequences such as wasted time, product, and damaged equipment.?Knowledgeable technicians ?with professional training and access to?specialized equipment ?is the only way to guarantee that calibrations are performed correctly. This will ultimately save you a great deal of time and energy.

As accredited calibration providers with a great deal of metrological knowledge and experience,?Ellab field calibration services ?can provide off-site calibrations ideal for stationary devices or minimizing downtime. With Ellab, you have a competent partner for these comprehensive calibration tasks.

4. Make Use of Pre- and Post-Calibration Routines

The routine calibration of your equipment is a necessity for meaningful data acquisition and required for?FDA 21 CFR Part 11 ?compliance primarily within the pharma and biotech industries.

While pre-calibration ensures that your equipment is properly calibrated and prepared before your process begins, post-calibration can be just as important. Performing post-calibrations ensures that nothing went wrong during the process itself, and accounts for any unexpected variations from initial pre-calibration results.

5. Factory Calibrate Your Sensors According to Recommendations

It is recommended that your sensors receive a factory calibration at least once a year, depending on the type and amount of usage of the measuring device.

Systematic control, regular calibrations and complete documentation can generate liability reduction and make a significant contribution to increasing the overall product quality.

Ellab factory calibrations ?use instrumentation that is traceable to DANAK, UKAS, NIST and many others, which means that we can check a wide variety of instruments, including data loggers, pressure gauges, temperature controllers, flow meters, regulator valves and much more. All to an officially recognized standard.

6. Periodically Check and Verify Your Sensors

Sensors should be periodically checked against a verifiable?reference standard ?in order to achieve the highest levels of accuracy.?While sensors with a decreased risk of drift may lower the required frequency of calibrations, those predisposed to drift or used in a critical process might warrant an increased frequency.

Faulty sensors can result in costly production downtime, false measurements,?safety issues and inferior product quality, but regular verifications can prevent these issues entirely.

ValSuite Pro’s ?embedded calibration functionality allows high quality in-house verification with templates for manual, semi-automatic or fully automatic calibrations. This means that all sensors and probes can be user-calibrated at predefined intervals, providing automatically generated reports and direct downloads of calibration certificates via the Ellab Cloud.