Standardisation

Our activity across BS, ISO, IEC, CEN, CENELEC and ASTM enables intersciencefire to work with our colleagues world-wide, gives us credibility in the global arena, and keeps us at the forefront of standardisation development.

Within Europe, most national regulations follow European Directives that use European Standard tests, though some national regulations also allow parallel use of national standards. European Standards (EN) for transport, construction and most other applications are produced by CEN, and those for electrotechnical products by CENELEC. Similar standards for each of these sets are developed for wider international use by the International Standards Organisation (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) respectively.

CEN, CENELEC, ISO and IEC committees are composed of experts representing the national standardisation bodies, and the standards they develop and modify are confirmed by ballots of new texts when national standardisation bodies' mirror committees vote. Often the same or similar documents are published as EN, ISO and even national standards, and they are dual numbered EN ISO standards.

intersciencefire's senior staff participate in all national mirror committees and most international and European committees where our test methods are standardised.

Defence standardisation

Defence procurement uses its own standards alongside the civil standards described above. In the UK these are the Defence Standards (DEF STAN), which superseded the Naval Engineering Standards (NES) — several of which remain in use and are still referenced by industry. At an alliance level, NATO Allied Flammability and Fire Assessment Publications (AFAPs) set common requirements across member nations.

intersciencefire is active in defence standardisation alongside its civil committee work, and offers testing referenced by these standards — including the determination of the toxicity index of combustion products to DEF STAN 02-713 / NES 713. See our defence testing .