SIDERISE has announced its Innovation Centre has achieved UKAS ISO 17025 accreditation, validating that it operates with the highest technical competency and generates reliable results.
Located at the global passive fire protection and acoustic solutions manufacturer’s HQ in South Wales, the Siderise Innovation Centre was officially opened by the First Minister of Wales, Mark Drakeford in March 2023. It features a specialist fire test furnace and data logging equipment, allowing it to test products to any published fire test curve.
To date, the Innovation Centre has carried out over 180 tests.
To achieve the accreditation, the centre was audited by UKAS. This included scrutiny of its quality management processes and records, training processes and records, and the witnessing of three fire resistance tests: EN 1366-3, EN 1366-4 and prEN1364-6.
Chris Mort, director of testing at Siderise, said, “We constructed the Innovation Centre to meet the increasing demand for testing and data for projects and product development, and a shortfall in available furnace time with the longer-term goal of making fire performance testing more accessible to our key industry stakeholders. From the outset, we knew we wanted to obtain UKAS accreditation to ensure we were operating it correctly to the international standard of competency.
“The whole process has moved smoothly, from applying for the accreditation in November 2023, with the audit inspection being carried out in January 2024 and the final certification being awarded in July. This is in part thanks to the hard work of our testing team, whose skills, knowledge and experience have been invaluable in establishing robust SOPs.”
