An individual portion of material collected by a single operation of a sampling device.
Increments may be reduced individually or tested either (a) individually or (b) combined
with other increments with the resulting
composite reduced in size and tested as a single unit. Increments are created by the sampling
operation and are usually taken from parts of a lot separated in time or space. Increments
of a bulk population correspond to units of a packaged population.
Source:
PAC, 1990, 62, 1193
(Nomenclature for sampling in analytical chemistry (Recommendations 1990))
on page 1205