ASTM International’s Committee E28 on Mechanical Testing has been developing standards for testing machines since 1969. What is the business value of ASTM standards and participating in the creation of these standards to developers and manufacturers of testing machines that are used all over the world?

There are many answers to this question depending on where one sits in the broad spectrum of the ASTM world and the application of its standards. I can only comment as a representative of a company that participates in what is often referred to as the test and measurement market segment. In ASTM language we are classified as “suppliers.”

In my 25-year history with Instron Corporation I have been an active member of Committee E28 for about 20 of these years. I was asked to join by my manager and there were only a couple of us from our company who attended any meetings regularly. After learning about ASTM’s processes and how the consensus standards development process works in general, I began to see the real value of participating in the subcommittees relevant to our business. I became the company advocate for the value of participating in ASTM and tried to recruit others to expand our coverage. I had limited success in the beginning, however, since technical professionals preferred technical meetings and marketing sales personnel preferred focusing on venues more supportive of their mission. There was a general belief that most of the necessary ASTM standards had been written and that it was just a matter of creating minor updates to keep them current. In fact, during tough economic times, Instron, like many other companies today, cut travel budgets and I had to fight to get approval to attend meetings. This only illustrates the contrast with the importance our company, and I am sure many other companies, now places on ASTM participation and its standards today.

In the early 1980s, E28 meetings were attended by a strong core of “old timers” who were in many cases involved in the original drafts of some of the mechanical testing standards. In my early involvement, the standards were changing but only by small increments based on round-robin test results. Early attempts at precision and bias statements seemed to be the focus of a lot of discussion. I learned a great deal during this period about the importance of the language used in these documents. Good standards were broad in their application and unambiguous in their meaning.

By the mid-1980s development in technology and global markets began to drive changes in testing standards at a pace probably not experienced since they were originally written. Although this is a very complex picture, most of the changes that affected the standards used in our business fell into one of four categories:
1. The technology world of instruments went from analog to digital both in their design and in the use of computers for control and output.
2. The development of complex materials (such as composites) required testing and evaluation beyond the scope of existing test standards.
3. Companies have become global in their sourcing of parts and materials as well as their manufacturing operations.
4. Following international quality standards including achievement of “accreditation” has become a necessity in doing business.

Technology
The instrument business went though a radical change during the period when computers became a practical, cost-effective part of a dedicated test instrument. These computers took the form of both integrated personal computers and microprocessor-based electronics that could be programmed and embedded to perform specific tasks. Many of the companies that took advantage of these technologies prospered and many who didn’t no longer exist.

During this transition, instruments (like Instron’s) changed from providing information about a test to actual results. For example, instead of outputting force and strain to a chart recorder to draw a line, modulus (or the slope of that line) could easily be calculated through software and the results printed on a report. As trivial as this may seem today, this simple example has had a dramatic effect on how a standard needs to be written.

Seldom is this plot a perfectly straight line, but the experience of a test engineer who worked with a particular material taught him where to place the ruler to get the best modulus for that material. In the past many ASTM standards were written around the interpretation of manually produced graphs to extract trends or results. The new digital world enabled designers of instruments to write algorithms to compute and report results such as modulus. It is much more difficult to write a specific calculation of slope on “imperfect” data than it is to use judgement of where to place your straight edge on a graph to measure the slope. It would be unlikely that two programmers would ever get the same results without standards quantifying specifically and in unambiguous language how these slopes should be calculated. In fact, many of us have spent hours trying to resolve differences of opinion between users of these standards who had been interpreting their graphical results in slightly different ways. We then could not agree on the more complete quantitative definitions without creating discrepancies with years of historical results.

For this relatively simple example of determining a materials modulus, the quantitative description of what we meant by modulus had to be adjusted to suit the behavior of the material or shape of the curve. Various ASTM standard committees have had to deal with this and other issues like this. Often a common language had to be developed along with appropriate definitions to meet the more rigorous requirements of this new digital world and all that it entailed. Incidentally, the end result on modulus is that Instron’s latest software has nine choices for determining modulus, most of which have variable parameters that can be set by the user.

Although I am mostly familiar with material testing standards, I believe all ASTM committees dealing with measurements of data and the computation of results must have had to deal with similar issues during this transition from analog to digital instrumentation. The committees were challenged with standardizing language — definitions and descriptions of characteristics that were important to their mission. In an open format the ASTM forum of suppliers and users provided a unique platform to take on this challenge in a non-commercial non-competitive environment. It is hard to imagine how any company such as ours (designer and manufacturer of instruments) could have made the advancements we did without the consensus achieved through the standardization process.

On occasion, Instron encounters a customer that does not want to follow an ASTM standard but wants to do something “special” or “proprietary.” We can accommodate them by customizing the system and accompanying software to meet their requirements. This process is inherently less efficient and more expensive than following an appropriate standard. If every system had to be treated this way it could be chaos for suppliers and would limit any interlaboratory comparison of the property or material in question. In this way ASTM standards play a vital role across the entire spectrum of a material-based market segment.

New Complex Materials
During my career in materials characterization and long association with ASTM there has been a dramatic shift of focus from “uniform” materials to complex materials. These new material systems presented new challenges to the testing community because existing test methods were not sufficient to provide the complete picture of performance. Even the simplest composite raised questions from designers about what the critical criteria were necessary to consider in their use. To a great extent the commercialization of a new type of material depends on appropriate testing standards and the subsequent database of information that can be used by designers. Without this there is no broad acceptance and these material systems either remain in the research labs or get used in limited special applications.

As a supplier of instruments that play a role in the commercialization of materials, we serve both the research and development as well as the quality control sides of the process. We often see researchers taking different approaches during the R&D phase, making the test system requirements different and at times the comparison of results impossible. This is all normal during the R&D stage but not an efficient part of the commercialization process. It is not until the standards are written and agreed upon that acceptance of something new really takes off and becomes successful in a commercial application.

Again, ASTM International has a unique environment in which to mix standards generation and the science of new materials in an open forum to serve the needs created by new materials and material systems. Once the hard work is done and the standards are accepted, the entire value chain is improved. This starts with the designer of the instrument doing the testing and then moves on to the manufacturer of the material. It then returns to the designer who uses the results to create new products through to the consumers of the products containing the technology.

Global Manufacturing
Any company considering a change in manufacturing sourcing must consider many factors. This is true whether it is purchased material or components or a change in manufacturing plant location. Obviously, cost drives some of this decision but lower cost without equivalent or better quality is not truly a lower cost. Thus, when a product is outsourced from the United States to a lower cost location, all the criteria to assess quality go with it. In this way ASTM standards are a critical tool for companies to monitor their products as they take part in the constantly changing manufacturing strategy necessary to stay competitive. I am not sure if it has been a “push” or a “pull,” but clearly ASTM International has recognized this and become a true global organization in its own right. This is reflected in the recent name change to ASTM International and the memorandums of understanding ASTM International has signed with the national standards bodies of various countries.

Our customers want to perform the same tests on their products all over the world and they hope to get the same results independent of where a product is made. When the results are not the same, the flags go up and the investigation starts to find out why. Our job is to make sure the problem is not in the test instrument and our customers must make sure the same test methods are being used. For U.S. companies, ASTM is usually the default standard and is usually applied globally. Companies like ours, who ensure that our systems meet these standards, have a big advantage in these international sales, even against lower-cost local competition. Participation in the creation and evolution of these standards adds even more credibility in this international testing community.

International Quality Standards
The effect of national and international quality standards on businesses is somewhat related to the globalization movement, but is often more focused on the quality of the laboratory and the accreditation process. ASTM Committee E28 creates the standards covering the calibration or verification of force— extensometers, testing machines and hardness machines. Before the widespread adoption by companies of quality standards, most of the changes to these ASTM documents were updates to cope with the current technology of transducers and electronics. Here again the world went from pure mechanical devices, to analog electronic-based systems to digital systems. The standards have evolved over the past 20 years accordingly.

The interest in and value of these calibration standards have grown mostly from the absolute need of test laboratories to prove their metrological validity by strict adherence to the guidance and boundaries set by these standards. In a relatively short period of time (depending on the industry) laboratories went from using an informal internal certification process to a highly audited external accreditation process. There are obviously some exceptions, such as the nuclear industry and the commercial aircraft industry, where they have been highly scrutinized and regulated for a long time, but this has not been the norm for most companies.

Attendance at calibration-related task group meetings has grown significantly through this period of change. Now that everyone is being audited for strict adherence to these standards, the precision of language and the technical requirements in the documents become more important than they were in the past. Managing a test lab used to be a career path in many companies. People in these jobs learned their trade well and stayed in these positions for a decade or two and sometimes more. A lab manager’s time in service is much less now, and companies worldwide and their employees cope with constant changes. Standards that guide or regulate the running of test equipment and the accreditation process have helped take the place of the career lab manager who often no longer exists. This has been a great benefit to those of us supplying equipment to these laboratories. On the one hand, compliance to these new requirements has become a necessity of doing business, and on the other it has equalized the playing field at all levels of the test and measurement segment.

Conclusions
Now let me return to the original question — what is the business value of ASTM standards and participating in the creation of these standards? Hopefully the above narrative has answered some of this question, but it is worth being more specific. Our company serves a very broad marketplace. Nearly all industry does some mechanical testing and we have a hand in most of them. Participating in the development of the standards that cover these markets has the following benefits.

• Participants get a good feel for what is important to the users, our customers, for the standards and often a good sense of where that particular market is going.

• Participants get to interact with competitive suppliers and contribute jointly with them to improve the standards from the viewpoint of companies selling in that industry.

• Participants help direct the changes to the standards and provide advance notice to their company’s R&D group on potential product changes that could be required to meet new revisions. This is especially true when changes affect application software, which can take considerable time to get through the development and quality-checking process.

• Participants can get a view of what is happening in similar International Organization for Standardization (ISO) activities through the ASTM technical advisory group subcommittees.

• Participants improve their technical competence and stature in our marketplace through their knowledge of their standards activities.

• Participants can provide technical input to their committees on the capabilities and limitations of instruments when relative to the technical requirement written into test standards.

For all these reasons, Instron’s participation has greatly increased during the past few years. We now make sure we budget properly for appropriate participation at the meetings. We meet internally every year to review the coverage to make sure we are covering our business needs. The requirement for attendance is to commit to regular and continued participation at the subcommittee and task group level.

At last count, Instron had 18 employees now working on 12 ASTM technical committees. Recently, a few young engineers have just started their participation. I can only hope that their experience will be as positive as mine has been for both their personal and professional development and the value they provide to the company as a result of these efforts. •

Copyright © ASTM, 2005