October 2008

ISO 3059 Standard viewing conditions. Revision.

A meeting will be held in Berlin on Nov 10 by the Working Group 4 (WG4) of the CEN (European Committee for standardisation) to begin working on a revised version of  ISO 3452 series standards; in the same agenda work is planned to talk about viewing conditions for Penetrant Testing and Magnetic Testing.

This WG is already looking to the new ways currently tested to detect indications using blue light instead of UV-A. Further problems of UV-A meters calibration should be discussed: LED sources have a very narrow bandwidth and calibration methods, measuring units, requirements by specifications or standards may soon become obsolete, inapplicable. Standardisation shall not be an obstacle to technical progress.

The current version of this ISO 3059 standard is still not recognised by the US industry for instance: one of the reasons is that measuring of UV-A irradiance is not performed at a given distance (15"-38 cm), which very often is NOT the "in-service" distance while the ISO standard requires the check be carried out in the real working conditions, i.e. all the UV-A sources in the "ON" position, at the working distance, on several points of the surface under inspection; visible light shall be measured also in the real working conditions, exactly as when the inspector looks for indications.

Please feel free to ask us for more details.

We, Pierre CHEMIN and Patrick DUBOSC, welcome any comment, any idea. If you have some examples you would like to see discussed here, please give us all the useful indications. If you require confidentially, we would modify locations, names and some parameters to prevent any traceability.
Nevertheless, we are convinced that our site may be a kind of surge-valve: the topic is NOT to target this company, or that auditor; but it is always to make users think, to make them ask themselves, or others, the right questions.

We may also give advice, once again on a confidential basis if needed: please, feel free to ask questions, to document our data basis: about Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS), about environment, a chemical name you don't understand, a Penetrant process you have heard about, etc.