Development of New Certified Reference Materials for Silicon Metals

Metalcasters rely on vendors to provide high quality, consistent products ensuring high-quality castings are manufactured. Metalcasters ensure their chemistry through standardizing their chemical analysis equipment through the use of Certified Reference Materials (CRM). But what if those standards did not exist? How could a foundry gage themselves against another? How could a customer ensure that the product from two different vendors would function the same? This was the case for the silicon metal industry. No common standards existed resulting in divergent readings of the same material from different analytical laboratories. Furthermore, differences in actual chemical analysis between vendors, supposedly produced to the same specification, are commonplace. This paper discusses the cooperative development and certification of nine new international CRM’s for the silicon metal industry.