Some Typical Sources of Uncertainty

Uncertainty of measurement can arise from many sources. I tend to focus on dimensional measurements

but the principles of uncertainty evaluation and many of the sources of uncertainty can be applied to any
measurement for example time, temperature, mass etc. Some sources of uncertainty which found in all
virtually all traceable measurements are the uncertainty of the reference standard used for calibration, the
repeatability of the calibration process and the repeatability of the actual measurement. Environmental
uncertainties such as the temperature will be significant sources of uncertainty for many measurements.
Resolution or rounding may not be a significant source of uncertainty for digital instruments reading out
to many decimal places beyond the repeatability of the system but is often significant for instruments with
a manually read scale such as rulers, dial gauges etc. Alignment is often a major source of uncertainty for
dimensional measurements.

Alignment Errors

Alignment is a common source of uncertainty in dimensional measurement. Any angular deviation from
the perpendicular measurement path will result in a cosine error in which the actual distance is the
measured distance multiplied by the cosine of the angular deviation.

Another common alignment error is parallax error. This results from viewing a marker, which is separated
by some distance from the scale or object being measured, at an incorrect angle. Parallax error commonly
observed when a passenger in a car reads the speedometer. If the viewing angle is not perpendicular to the
ruler this will result in parallax error.

Abbe Error is similar to parallax error but rather than resulting from alignment of viewing angles it results
from alignment of machine axes. The distance between the axis along which an object is being measured
and the axis of the instruments measurement scale is known as the Abbe Offset. If the distance along the
object is not transferred to the distance along the scale in a direction perpendicular to the scale then this
will result in an error. The size of this error will be the tangent of the angular error multiplied by the Abbe
Offset. Instruments such as Vernier callipers are susceptible to Abbe Error as the measurement scale is
not co-axial with the object being measured.

Repeatability and Reproducibility

Repeatability is estimated by making a series of measurements, generally by the same person and under
the same conditions, and then finding the standard deviation of these measurements. Reproducibility is
estimated by making a series of measurements, each by a different person.
Resolution

Uncertainty of measurement due to resolution is a result of rounding errors. For many digital instruments
the readout resolution is many times smaller than the actual instrument uncertainty. In such cases
rounding errors due the instrument resolution are insignificant.

For more traditional instruments resolution is often a significant source of uncertainty. The maximum
possible error due to rounding is half of the resolution. For example when measuring with a ruler which
has a resolution of 1 mm the rounding error will be +/- 0.5 mm which has a rectangular distribution.
Converting a tolerance with a rectangular distribution into a standard uncertainty is covered later.

Temperature

Temperature variations effect measurements in a number of ways:-

 Thermal expansion of the object being measured and of the instrument used to measure it
 For interferometric measurements changes in the refractive index
 For optical measurements which depend on light following a straight line path temperature
gradients will cause refraction leading to bending of the light and therefore distortions

Calibration

Any errors in the reference standard used to calibrate a measurement instrument are transferred during
calibration. Instruments therefore inherit uncertainty from their calibration standard. The actual process of
calibration is also not perfectly repeatable; therefore additional uncertainty is introduced through the
calibration process.

If calibration has been carried out by an accredited calibration lab then an uncertainty will be given on the
calibration certificate. This is not the uncertainty for measurements made using the instrument; it is
simply the component of uncertainty due to calibration. This point is often overlooked.

So, in measurements there have many factor of typical sources of uncertainty such as alignment
error, repeatability and reproducibility, resolution temperature and calibration. There factor can cause
fatal errors in various measurement fields.