Name: NSF Testing Services: Ensuring Performance and Compliance
Uploaded: 2025-10-28T18:01:04.858Z
Duration: 35 min 20 s
Description: NSF Testing Services: Ensuring Performance and Compliance

Transcript for "NSF Testing Services: Ensuring Performance and Compliance": Good afternoon. Good morning. Good day, everyone. Welcome to, the first webinar in our series of three three that we're presenting on NSF testing, consulting, and forensic services. For those who don't know me, I am Michael Conrad. I am the technical director of engineering at NSF. And what we're going to do for this first webinar is really essentially give you a virtual tour of our facilities and the testing equipment there and how you might use that equipment to ensure how the performance and compliance and possibly even accelerate the, certification testing that you're looking to have completed. So as you entered our lab, the first piece of equipment that you would see would be our chlorine rig or, oxidative testing equipment. I can see that on the right hand side. And with that, what we are looking to do is we are looking to understand the, long term performance and service lifetime under a specific water quality, with an Osteo disinfectant. This is really applicable to PEX polypropylene, and polyethylene products. To give you a sense of how the equipment is run and how the testing is set up, what we do is we start with the reverse osmosis or the ionized water. We really wanna make sure that there are no disinfectants coming in from, say, seasonal changes, from the city. So we make sure we scrub those out, and then we adjust the chlorine and the pH within that to make sure that we're meeting the quality of the standard. Once we have that water system set up, we send it through a preheater to get anywhere between 30 and a 115 degrees Celsius. And once we're at the temperature for the test, we do a one pass system through the parts that you can see along the bottom there, and that is a one pass to drain. Each one of those preheater and test setups is a test chamber, which you can see on the right hand side. You can see 12 on what we call a test skid, and each one of those 12 chambers has its own possible pressure temperature combination. Now there are a number that are obviously repeated because, you know, there are certain conditions that are used as standard. But, again, we can set it anywhere between 30 to a 115 Celsius and possibly even vary the pH or the chlorine concentration to do, additional testing. Now that we understand the test setup, what's the information that we get out of that test? What we get is something called a protocol. And so we take the data that we plot on a log stress versus log time curve. Each one of those blue diamonds you see would be a failure point from a one pipe that is put on test and fails under the appropriate mechanism that we're looking for, which you'll hear in, stage three or an oxidative mechanism. And so once we get those 12 data points, we set, multilinear regression, which you can see on the blue lines there. And we then project that performance out to 60 degrees Celsius, or a 140 Fahrenheit. I can see that projection, circled in green, and we compare that to the requirements of the standard. In this case, we're looking at we want fifty years performance at 80 PSI pressure, at that 60 degrees Celsius to get the highest chlorine rating for, say, the polypropylene or the PEX product. And in this case, for this particular product, we would see that it passes. And so in that case, we would get there. Now we also talk about, how long these tests can take. And as you can see, this type of test can take on the order of, two years or potentially more, based on the failure time that we are looking for for those products. And so really the question is, you know, can we potentially, decrease that time? Right? Here's a long time to wait for test data. And you can see what we have here is a a different distribution. For that protocol, we need those 12 data points across six test units, specific temperature pressure combination. What you can do is also spread those 12 units a little differently. On that first that slide before we had shown, two at the highest temperature, two at the medium temperature, and two at the lowest temperature. In this case, we've done three at the highest temperature, two at the middle temperature, and one at the lowest temperature. You see that additional testing, by those orange diamonds on the left hand side, and then that allows us to remove those longest term specimens. I can see the no smoking sign, there. And that shifts the total time frame for testing from the red line to the green line. Now this is a log scale, so it doesn't look like a large shift. But because of that log scale, it can be on the order of four to five months. So that's a way to look at potentially, decreasing the time to get this full protocol coming out of this testing. The other type of testing that we do on this is for, polyethylene. It's a little different. It's a single point test, which you can see here, and there's a number of chlorine categorizations, ranging from cc zero through to cc three. Across the top, we see the different stress conditions that we can choose for the product, which is, typically tested in a four inch d r 11. If you look at the bottom right of that table, you see what would be the shortest test time to get a c c three, which is seventy four hundred hours. So, again, to accelerate, we want to test at the highest stress condition, and that gets us the lowest amount of time to possibly pass. In this case, you're testing five specimens and you just need to meet the test requirement. I bring that up because if you're looking to do, say, minor formulation changes to your product, then you may wanna do what is called an equivalency. In this case, you can see the parameters along the left, and there are two methods that we use to do this particular, testing. There's a method a, where we use the same size of product, but we reduce the number of specimens, and that needs to meet the original test time. So if we grade seventy four hundred hours to get a c three three rating, we need to also get seventy four hundred hours for this particular test under method a. Conversely, if we look at method b, we're testing a smaller product. Because it's smaller, there's the probability that the test time is gonna be lower. And I can tell you based on our experience, rather than meeting the seventy four hundred hours, it's on the order of three to five thousand hours. So, again, we've now decreased our time by two thousand hours. I know we're talking hours a lot. That's about three months, worth of testing. And so, you can see in this case, you do require more specimens. You're looking at six. It does say or 12 because we need to generate a baseline for that. Once you have that baseline, you now, can modify your formulation and, potentially, it's faster testing. I'd rather than going to the seventy four hundred for method a, we're down to maybe four or five thousand hours for method b. And the requirement in this case is that you must meet a percentage of the failure time of that original product. And so it's another way to look at sort of a risk versus reward. Right? Because many, once you reach that seventy four hundred hours, you may stop test. So we don't know how much longer it could have gone. Sometimes when you go into that baseline for method b, it's a bit of an unknown, but there is a probability, that the testing would be faster overall. So that is the chlorine testing. As we continue through the lab, we move over to our pressure testing area. It's similar, to the chlorine testing and that we put specimens on test for a certain amount of time and essentially wait till they fail. But we don't use the disinfected water. In this case, we're just using plain, reverse osmosis water. And what we're looking for is to characterize the long term, creep rupture mechanism and, evaluate, essentially, the performance envelope. So within that pressure testing area, we have over a thousand automated stations, 23 baths, 20 ovens. So there are a lot of places that we can put the the pipe on test. Now those ovens are all at different temperatures. Again, similar to the chlorine, there are many standard temperatures that we do have, and you can see that those range from 68 to 248 Fahrenheit or 20 to a 100 degrees 120 degrees Celsius. Within that, obviously, we move to ovens once we've reached the boiling point of water. Right? Because we that's what we use as an external medium for a lot of these baths, and we can, consistently reach up to 2,900 psi in pressure. From that, I mentioned, you know, we're trying to characterize this performance envelope. So So you can see the log stress versus log time plot again. You can see that oxidative, testing along the right hand side, that very steep line. From the pressure testing equipment, we're looking to characterize either the stage one ductile performance or the stage two brittle performance. So, again, as I said, we place a test specimen on test and wait until it fails. The question does become, you know, when we look at the conditioning, though, going into these tests, it is helpful to inform the lab or the testing, facility whether what you're looking to do with the end result. Right? Are you looking to go, into ASTM, the more North American standards, or you're looking to possibly do the ISO, standards that are used, more internationally? Because that depends on how the lab is going to set up the testing, even something as simple as conditioning the pipe before you place it under pressure. You can see here, it's really dependent on the thickness of the wall that the pipe has. There are only two instances across this entire table where they are the same between ISO and ASTM. So if we don't know going into that whether we're hitting ISO or ASTM, you know, we don't wanna make the choice inadvertently because we may not have the right conditioning and then perhaps the report gets rejected. Right? So we really want to avoid that. This also comes up when we're looking at the data distributions. So when we're looking to do the analysis to get that stage one failure, so you'll see here again that log time versus log stress curve. We see that, we're getting that ductile line. All those data points are one piece of pipe that's been placed on test and then failed, and we need to get a certain distribution. What I've highlighted here, sort of your standard e 10, and so the 10 is for ten thousand hours. That's the longest specimen we need to have. We need 18 total data points. You know, they're they're distributed across the time frame. Right? Anywhere from less than a thousand hours all the way up to that that ten thousand hour mark. And so we need to make sure that we have data within those ranges in order to satisfy this requirement. Conversely, ISO is a little different. In this case, you can see we've got multiple temperatures that we're testing, and, the only constraints that ISO has is we need four greater than seven thousand hours and one greater than 9,000. It also has the provisions to, remove some specimens that are less than a thousand hours at temperatures less than four degrees Celsius. So again, they're looking to analyze the data to obtain the same result, which is really the that long term pressure strength of the product. But but because we're doing it in slightly different ways, again, we wanna be aware of that going into it. I've highlighted the differences here, and this is a comparison between the two. So we've got an attribute on the left hand side, and we compare ISO versus ASTM. So if we're looking at the data points, in ISO, it's observations. In ASTM, it's failures. So what that means is often, ISO can complete the testing with more non failure points than ASTM, and that can cause headaches when you're trying to take an ISO report and potentially convert the data into ASTM. Again, forewarn the lab, and everything proceeds smoothly. Looking at test lots, again, typically, it's one for ISO, but there's multiple lots for ASTM. You can use multiple lots for ISO. You just have to, again, make sure they're it's placed in the right, part of the testing. The test temperature, both of them have multiple test temperatures where ISO they're analyzed together versus ASTM being analyzed separately. And the final value that you do get out of the testing is slightly different between ASTM and ISO, where ASTM is fifty years and the MRS or minimum required strength, and ASTM is the HDB or hydrostat design basis at eleven years. So, again, we'll go into more details if you have questions later, but this is sort of the difference between them. Absolutely critical to highlight where you want to take the data, so that the lab can help support from that perspective. Another item to look at when trying to decide where this data is going, is in North America. A a lot of the testing is driven by, PPI or Plastic Pipe Institute, technical report three or t r three. What What you can see here is a table that lays out the testing that would be required for polyethylene. And you see that there are two different grade levels. There's an experimental grade and a standard grade. That's one way to potentially accelerate getting product to market is by starting to go to market after an experimental grade. There is a risk because you need to convert that experimental grade eventually into a standard grade listing. From that perspective, there are certain data requirements that are needed to progress there. And so it's a it's a question of risk versus reward again. Right? Do you have, full confidence in the product? You know, is this something that you're very familiar with? Maybe it makes sense to go on experimental grade perspective versus it's brand new, full newly developed. Let's wait until they get standard grade before we proceed to market. A couple other ways to potentially accelerate doing these types of testing. If you look at the experimental grade, you can get it as soon as two thousand hours. We see an e two. The two is the longest running test specimen divided by a thousand hours. So two thousand hours, if you run at a slightly higher temperature. Right? So if you run a test at a 176 Fahrenheit as well as a 140, now you can start to get an experimental grade at two thousand hours. The other thing to note here is when it has a requirement for validation. There are two temperatures that are listed, either one seventy six or a 194 Fahrenheit. Validation is accelerated by temperature. So you can imagine, if you wanna accelerate it as much as possible, you would wanna test at the 194 Fahrenheit, level versus a 176 Fahrenheit. And validation is a great segue into the other failure mode that we can get out of this test equipment, which is the stage two brittle failure. There are a number of ways to validate a product. There are three here that you see. So you have the table or standard grade method. You have the ISO ninety eighty method, and you have the rate process method. Each of these vary on how the approach to time, temperature, and stress is considered. So for the time in the table or ISO ninety eighty method, the time is fixed. There's a certain requirement of time that must be met in order for the product to pass, whereas the rate process method is variable. Again, we have on temperature, the table method and the ISO ninety eighty method temperatures are fixed, whereas the rate process method is also variable. And finally, from a stress perspective and, you know, the pressure that we apply to the product, table method is fixed, whereas the other two are variable. So often what we can see is, in this case, the table method was the fastest way, to get a product through, but sometimes it doesn't work for every product. And so they may have to shift from, say, the table method to the ISO 90 method and then finally the process method. What we've done is we've looked at an approach where you can set up a hybrid test between the table method and the s of 90 b 80 method. It's often the data that is generated in trying to meet the table method can be used in the s of ninety eighty method. I didn't wanna lose any time by doing those sequentially, So we essentially run the test in parallel as a way to accelerate getting that certification and understanding the product performance. Moving on from our pressure testing, we swing around the lab. We're working our way towards the back at this point, and we're into our chemical testing. And so you can see a fume hood that we have on the right hand side. Here we do our solvent cement testing. We do some cross link density or also known as gel testing as well as the chemical resistance testing. I wanted to highlight a way here and how understanding the standards landscape and the testing, can potentially help you get more similar to ISO versus ASTM, get you more testing out of the same data. You can see on the left, we have the ASTM d twenty five thirteen or CSA b one thirty seven point four testing. This is the chemical resistance. These are the chemicals that the product must be subjected to prior to doing some post exposure testing. And so from there, what we have is, a choice in the antifreeze that is selected. From that, we can look at either a 100% methanol or 100% ethylene glycol. From there, we use the, we can select either of those two. By comparison, if we look at the NSF three fifty eight, which is for geothermal products, then we can get, the there are different antifreezes that are selected, and you can see that 100% methanol shows up there as well. And from that perspective, if we select to do chemical resistance at a 100% methanol, we're normally knocking two tests off. You know, two birds with one stone, we get two tests for the price of one. As we continue to move around the lab, we move into our RCP or rapid crack propagation, piece of equipment. This is to ISO 13,477. That is the slow small scale steady state or s four test. There is a full scale test, but that requires 50 feet of pipe, a 100 foot bladder. We don't do that test. I can only imagine trying to ship 50 feet of pipe across various, locations, and so we look at the small scale. By small scale, we're still getting up to, a 12 inch product. From that perspective, you can see where we put the, 12 inch d r 11 piece of pipe, in the v block at the bottom there. And then from the test itself, we, essentially accelerate a blade that impacts the pipe. And we're trying to understand when the pipe shifts from a ductile, behavior to a grill behavior. That's either dependent on pressure or, temperature. We don't want this crack to rapidly propagate. Right? You can imagine laying down a mile of pipe and then having a crack propagate through it and removing a mile of pipe. So, really, we wanna understand what is the highest pressure that we can take this product to and what is the lowest temperature to define that sort of operation window, when we're doing it. This is, predominantly for gas pipe, that we would run this test. And it is really to understand from a acceleration perspective, because the test itself is based on essentially fracture mechanics. You wanna test the thickest product, because of the chance of having the largest flaws there, and that will qualify anything under it. So, again, we wanna understand what's, you know, the possibly the largest we're looking to, bring to market, and that's the product you would wanna test here. Speaking of large pipes, we've talked about, 12 inch. Now we move around to our large pipe testing pressure equipment. On the left hand side, you see what's, it's actually known as a sandbox. It's really to hold large pipe, to be tested at elevated temperatures. In this case, we're looking up to 24 inch, polyethylene pipe, like including a 176 Fahrenheit. On the right hand side, you see a test rig designed for large PVC products. In this case, really, we want that, to ensure to do it safely. We don't want the caps coming off, so we have to put restraints on them from that perspective to, ensure safety of everyone in the lab. So then large pipe testing. Question is why. I've just talked about not wanting to ship products across that are quite large. And so, a lot of it can be QC testing. There are provisions in many standards that sizes must be tested. And while they'll divide them by range, there are still some large ranges out there. You know, up to 14 inch for some of the standards. The other one to look at, which may be more, not concerned, but of of interest is, some of the FM standards, or these are gonna be fire standards for fire means. If we look at the PVC example, right, the quick burst test and the hydro stack strength test, the because it is a fire, based standard and that is a critical system from a safety perspective, they want to ensure that every size, and if you're looking at fittings, configuration is tested. And so in order to ensure a full product range, you're gonna wanna look at every size. That said, it is difficult to ship stuff across, so there are other approaches to take it. One, you know, look at how many, you know, what's the max the size that's most used in the industry, maybe start there, and and approach it in phases, versus sending everything on. But as I said, we do have the capability to go up, to quite large sizes for these type of products. Also, from a large pipe perspective, you know, that was the pressure testing. Now we're looking at the mechanical testing. Right? So here you see a slightly different large pipe product. It's gonna be a corrugated product. This is a pipe stiffness or a compression test on that because there's no pressure inside supporting the wall. We wanna make sure it doesn't collapse, under the soil. And so you see some of our load frame, parameters there. Right? 20 to 60,000 pound load frames, and up to four and a half feet of clearance in order to compress the pipe. Looking at the results, we might get out from that, mechanical testing. Again, we have, ring tensile that's required on every size, for the FM style standards. In this case, it's for polyethylene. And then if we look at, pipe stiffness, you can see a number of different parameters there, between two different standards. You got the ASTM f six six seven, f six six seven m, and the AASHTO standard on the right hand side. I can see they cover similar sizes in products, but what's different is the specimen length. Right? In the ASTM standard, it's as long as the OD, whereas the AASHTO standard requires a minimum of 12 inches. And so you could come in with a three inch product. You know, if the lab is not aware of the multiple standards that are there, they may test a three inch and then that data would not be applicable for the AASHTO standard. You have to essentially retest the same product if you were able to use it for both standards. The other thing that, again, comes up when looking at the standard landscape is the requirements for pipe stiffness. Right? The ASTM has two levels of pipe stiffness, required at 510%, whereas the AASHTO only has the 5% requirement. And so, again, you have to look at where exactly the product is going into right the standards so that the testing could be set up at the beginning, rather than playing catch up as the testing goes on. As we continue to move through, we're looking at sort of additional materials testing. In this case, it's the the carbon black. And so I've laid out here a number of polyethylene standards for water. They have different allowed colors, in this case, often the c or the e when we're looking at UV. C is for the carbon black and u e UV and colored is, e for a UV colored product. You can see from the carbon back perspective, most of them are between two and three, but there's one at two and a half. So, again, we wanna make sure that we understand the full landscape of the standards so that we're not inadvertently creating a product that doesn't meet the majority. The other thing to consider is if you are making a colored product, for these, they have different requirements for the total UV exposure. Right? Some are eighteen months, some are twenty four months, some are thirty six months. So, again, if there's I the idea that you'd like to go for multiple standards, in this case, you know, unfortunately, we can't shorten the time, but it is better to leave it on for the full thirty six months rather than, you know, pull it at eighteen and then decide, oh, we did wanna continue this for another eighteen months to get into another standard. We've now moved most of the way around the facility, and we're in our Dimensioning Room. In this case, I really wanted to highlight again that standard landscape and understanding where you wanna take your products. Here, we have ASTM, d seventeen eighty five and UL six fifty one. So we're working at PVC. I've picked, two one inch products. You can see that they both have the same average OD, and then we look at the minimum and maximum OD. Here, they are saying the same thing, but slightly different. If you look at the ASTM standard, it's the difference between the maximum and minimum must be a certain value. And if you do the math, that matches the difference between the two in UL six fifty one. But in ASTM, if there's nothing that says that your maximum minimum OD have to meet those size. Right, you could still meet the requirement of the difference, but not meet the requirements of the u l six fifty one. It's a similar approach with wall thickness. Again, they both have the same wall thickness. The SDM standard has a maximum essentially allowed wall thickness. There's not one in u l six fifty one, and yet there is because they tell you that you can have it only a certain average ID. So again, slightly different approaches to the same end result that if we're not cautious, we're potentially missing taking a product from one standard to another. Another approach, to dimensions is when we start to look at functional layers. Here, we've got an example of a PERT product, or possibly a PERT product, but we'll use PERT for this example, with a functional layer. If we look at the product on the left hand side, the minimum wall thickness for half inch SDR nine is 70 pound. So that PERT, the material itself, would be tested, and then we don't need to do testing once we convert it to a pipe product, assuming we've met the minimum 70 thou thickness. If we then decide we wanna put a functional layer on the outside and we maintain that minimum wall thickness, no testing is required. If we decide if we then look to put that functional air on the outside, but because of the difficulty in manufacturing, we've reduced that wall thickness a little bit from that minimum required 70 tau. We then have to do testing, to the hydrostatic strength equivalency that's laid out in many of the standards. And then finally, if we take that functional layer and we decide to put it in the middle of the product, essentially breaking that mono wall, even though the total wall thickness is the same, like thirty five and thirty five thousand is your full 70 pounds wall, we need to do testing per that t r three or technical report three from from PPI. So understanding standards and the testing that's gonna be required within them helps decide maybe how we wanna approach, putting functional layers within a product. Also, near our dimension room is we have our NCLS and UCLS testing or notched constant ligament stress and unnotched constant ligament stress. This test, since you put a coupon, that's either notched or notched and, putting it under tension until it fails. This is really in support of some of the AASHTO work as well as QC testing. The UCLS is gonna be of interest. It's coming into a lot of the standards from a recycled product perspective. So if you're incorporating a recycled product, you wanna understand the UCLS requirements. Also, you know, I've been talking standards a lot. Understanding that landscape and and participating in the committees helps you see where potentially, a test is going. In this case, they're looking to be a shift from a surfactant to, no surfactant in the test. And so in understanding that, possibly dividing test towards it can help accelerate maybe the certification when it does come through. Also looking at material testing, that lets us define cell classes for a product. In this case, we've got a PRRT example. We have two different standards. One's really for a non potable application. The other is for hot and cold water distribution. And you can see the cell class values that are required for the various parameters, the density, melt flow, tensile strength as an example. And understanding that one is more constrained than the other lets you understand once we've completed the cell class testing where you may able may be able to apply a product or how to design a product to meet both requirements at the same time. Similar, we have, PVC cell class testing, different tests because different industries determine what are the most critical tests, for cell class. We do have a non pressure versus a, pressure example, a rigid PVC example. What I've done here though is I've highlighted exact values for each of the parameters. Right? So we've got an exact value for the isode, the tensile, the heat of deflection at 72. The two standards both have the same test parameters in a cell class table, but the divisions between the cell classes has changed. And so you get completely different cell classes depending on which standard you're going to. So that comes in where someone's specifying a standard and are specifying a subclass that says I need to meet this subclass and you're well, that one doesn't quite, work with what we have. It's just because they're pulling it from a different standard. Again, helping that can help understand certification, how to bring, products to market. As we continue through our materials testing, a lot of those self test are done on our tensile equipment. I'm showing a couple more here. Again, we've got the, the test parameters of the 20 to 60,000, load frames and, that span of four and a half feet on the larger frame that we do have. And finally, to to finish off the tour of the lab is really into the chemical testing. Right? On the left hand side, you have our FTIR or Fourier Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. There, we're looking at potentially chemical contamination, which you'll hear more about some of the subsequent seminars where we get into more of the r and d and and forensics analysis. And on the right hand side, we have the DSC or differential scanning calorimetry, and that's where we do, transitions. Again, also digging into the product. Some standards require oxidation induction time tests, which should be done on this equipment. And and behind that, we have an entire, chemistry lab. For those who are familiar with NSF testing, we're working in ACOS environments. All that equipment to support, any other interesting approaches that we may have from a from a chemical perspective. And, again, we'll talk about touch on that further on the subsequent, webinars. So in summary, you know, there are, many performance tests that are found in multiple standards. And so really understanding the requirements for that test and understanding where it might be different depending on the standard. And and the test between the standards is really critical to helping accelerate it. And so that whole landscape, really needs to be understood as well as the testing and can absolutely support from that perspective and and all the testing we have. And, you know, I really hope you enjoyed the tour. I saw the tour, the virtual tour of our lab. And with that, you know, I any questions and, you know, if there are further after this, there's my contact information that, should you need to contact me. And so the first question's come in as well as recording the available download. Absolutely. If you've registered for this, we'll make sure that you can get a copy of this for, future viewing. Alright. Another question, you know, that that does come up is, you know, are there other ways to accelerate? Right? We talk a lot about testing. From that perspective, you know, there are other ways. They're more administrative, I would call them. You know, some of it we have is, there's paperwork that comes in with a lot of our certification products, making sure that's understood and and filled out properly. You know, as you can imagine, filling out paperwork, dot the i's, cross the t's, making sure that's all filled out. That will help accelerate, understanding. We've talked about understanding where you wanna go and where you wanna take the product. So if you know the standards offhand, that will absolutely help get through versus going through the process of understanding what standards you may or may not want. That could help accelerate. And finally, you know, there's always rush fees. Right? We have to be there if, yeah, if things really need to be done quickly, that's always an approach to accelerate the the certification of it as well. Well, I'm not seeing any other, questions come through at this time. So as you said, it's available for download. Thank you for joining me on this, this afternoon. I hope this was informative for all of you, and, look forward to seeing you on the next couple that are coming through in, over, from now until sort of January time frame. So look look for those, coming out soon. Alright. Thank you.