Flight acceptance

Flight acceptance is the concurrence that a product or system is ready for flight following the appropriate acceptance testing. An acceptance test is the validation process that demonstrates that hardware and/or software is acceptable for use. It provides the basis for delivery of an item under terms of a contract, where the contract should specify acceptance criteria. It also serves as a quahty control screen to detect deficiencies. A product can be accepted or rejected based on how well the product s performance compares with preestablished acceptance criteria. 

When converted into decibel, the sensitivity of elements should rather stand in the range of +/-3 dB. The time of flight should show very smooth variations corresponding to a mispositioning of the probe or of the active surface, if any. Acceptance criteria depends on the shape of the probe let us just say that for plane probes expected variations should be below... 

Unfortunately, now that such methods have become available, such as the Time Of Flight Diffraction (TOFD) technique, this revolution does not happen. What we see instead is a much slower process towards quantitative NDT, in combination with adapted acceptance criteria for weld defects. 

In principle GD-MS is very well suited for analysis of layers, also, and all concepts developed for SNMS (Sect. 3.3) can be used to calculate the concentration-depth profile from the measured intensity-time profile by use of relative or absolute sensitivity factors [3.199]. So far, however, acceptance of this technique is hesitant compared with GD-OES. The main factors limiting wider acceptance are the greater cost of the instrument and the fact that no commercial ion source has yet been optimized for this purpose. The literature therefore contains only preliminary results from analysis of layers obtained with either modified sources of the commercial instrument [3.200, 3.201] or with homebuilt sources coupled to quadrupole [3.199], sector field [3.202], or time-of-flight instruments [3.203]. To summarize, the future success of GD-MS in this field of application strongly depends on the availability of commercial sources with adequate depth resolution comparable with that of GD-OES. 

There are at least three approaches to fast GC/MS (1) use of microbore columns with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (TOFMS) (2) use of low-pressure (LP)-GC/MS to aid separations at increased flow rate " and (3) use of supersonic molecular beam mass spectrometry (SMBMS) (also known as supersonic GC/MS), which can accept increased flow rates and short analytical columns."... 

With time of flight instruments, a mass accuracy better than 5 ppm can be achieved, while with Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance or orbitrap mass spectrometers mass accuracies better than 1 ppm have been reported. It is obvious that, for good mass accuracies, the peaks must be baseline resolved and resolution plays an essential role. For the present example, a mass resolving power of 5000 seems to be quite acceptable. In the case of the [M+H]+ + 1 isotope peak, the situation becomes somewhat more complex for molecules containing nitrogen, sulfur or carbon. Figure 1.5 D illustrates at a mass resolving power of 500000 the contribution of... 

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