Siderise Innovation Centre achieves UKAS accreditation

Located at the global passive fire protection and acoustic solutions manufacturer’s headquarters in South Wales, the Siderise Innovation Centre was officially opened by the First Minister of Wales Mr Mark Drakeford in March 2023. It features a 1.5m3 specialist fire test furnace and data logging equipment, allowing us it to test products to any published fire test curve. In addition to aiding R&D and project-specific testing. To date, the Innovation Centre has carried out over 180 tests.

To  achieve the accreditation, the Centre was rigorously audited by UKAS to ensure full compliance with ISO 17025. This included in-depth 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. These were undertaken following the requirements of EN1363-1&2 General Requirements of Fire Resistance Testing and each test required a full Fire Resistance Test Report to be authored and audited by UKAS to ensure full compliance with ISO 17025 and the relevant standards associated with the test.

Director of Testing at Siderise, Chris Mort— who pioneered the Innovation Centre project from the beginning— said of the achievement:

“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.”