ABSTRACT
The industrial hygiene laboratory is crucial to the industrial hygienist's ability to generate reliable compliance data. This chapter describes operations and decision-making in the industrial hygiene laboratory, and the industrial hygienist the necessary tools to evaluate and ensure that good data are being generated. It also describes typical and special analytical instrumentation used in an industrial hygiene laboratory. The linearity, which is also called the dynamic range of an analytical method, describes the range of concentration of an analyte that can be analyzed without dilution or preconcentration of the sample. The sensitivity of a method is defined as the slope of the response curve. This is most easily visualized in colorimetry: a compound that is strongly colored can be more easily detected at different concentrations than a compound which has a faint color. The detector senses the presence of components different from the carrier gas and converts this information into an electrical signal.
