A Practical Exercise to Quantify Precision and Ensure Reliability of Measurements
Gilberto Rayas · 2021
Testing samples in a laboratory to study a design and make predictions about a population is a very common practice in engineering. Arguably almost as common is the practice of treating these measurements as gospel, ignoring the possibility that the results extracted, and the conclusions drawn, could change if a margin of error of the measurement was considered. This paper describes a statistical exercise to study and improve a measurement system error through Measurement System Analysis techniques using JMP software. It consists of a two-step procedure that enables publishing measurements along with their precision. The exercise was done on a system that measures thermal resistance of liquid-cooled cold plates. The cold plate designs were for an electronic package of a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The measurement system error was quantified, analyzed, and reduced by a factor of 2.2 times its initial value.