Contamination Control Standards Development Group Meets in Florida

Twenty-eight committee members of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to Subcommittee 6 – Contamination control reconvened the week of June 10 in St. Augustine, Florida. The focus of the meeting was on deliverables for the October 2019 TC 131/SC 6 meetings in Milan, Italy where U.S. experts will meet with worldwide engineering counterparts.

Work continues on two major projects:

• ISO 11171, Calibration of automatic particle counters for liquids:  An International Interlaboratory Study (ILS) is currently underway to:
  • Measure the intra-company repeatability and inter-company reproducibility of particle count data obtained using automatic particle counters calibrated with draft ISO DIS 11171:2019.
  • Generate particle count data to be used by NIST to certify consensus standard SRM 2806d that will report sizes in units of μm(c).
  • Generate particle count data for NIST RM 8632a that will be used to update Table A.1 in the standard.

  The study is expected to wrap-up by June 30 to allow time for analysis before a presentation is given during the meetings in October.

• ISO 23369 Filter multi-pass test under cyclic flow conditions:  An ILS was recently completed to measure the intra-company repeatability and inter-company reproducibility of data obtained using the procedures of ISO/DIS 23369:2013 along with particle counters calibrated with the ISO/DIS 11943:2013 with traceability to ISO 11171: evaluating fine and course filters with ISOMTD and ISOFTD.The results were analyzed and discussed. U.S. committee members will review the data and provide any additional questions to the project leader to be included in the presentation to the international experts during the Ocober meetings.

The U.S. TAG on contamination control meets three times per year in the United States. The ISO/TC 131/SC 6 meets internationally once per year. If you would like to get involved in the U.S. ISO Standards development process, please contact Denise Husenica at dhusenica@nfpa.com.