develop consensus standards for use by TNI's programs. This group has a support role in assisting other programs with activities such as guidance and standards interpretation.
fosters the generation of data of known and documented quality is through the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program, or NELAP. The purpose of this program is to establish and implement a program for the accreditation of environmental laboratories.
is to establish and maintain a national PT program to support TNI’s National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program, and other activities.
Field Activities Program (NEFAP) Executive Committee is to establish and implement an accreditation program for field sampling and measurement organizations (FSMOs).
Audit Sample Program is to develop consensus standards for the manufacture and analysis of audit samples for source emission testing.
on a variety of topics of interest to the environmental measurement community. TNI also hosts two regularly scheduled meetings per year, typically in January and August. Both are a week long and involve open meetings of TNI committees as well as training courses and other special sessions.Standard Interpretation
Standard: 2016
Section: V1M2, Section 5.5.8
REQUEST:
The section of the Standard states "Whenever practicable, all equipment under the control of the laboratory and requiring calibration shall be labelled, coded or otherwise identified to indicate the status of calibration, including the date when last calibrated and the date or expiration criteria when recalibration is due."
Most labs have interpreted that this requirement applies to support equipment such as balances and pipettors. Does this section apply to analytical equipment such as turbidimeters, spectrophotometers, pH meters, ICP-MS, etc?
TNI FINAL RESPONSE:
While yes, this statement does apply to analytical equipment, the more important consideration is the phrase “labelled, coded or otherwise identified”. “Otherwise identified” incorporates a multitude of processes for ensuring equipment is currently calibrated when in use. Analytical equipment will have more practicable manners of linking calibration status to the equipment, such as is likely found in run logs, data packets, or whatever system the laboratory uses for its analytical records. It isn’t always practicable (possible, yes, but impracticable) to label analytical instrumentation with calibration status but it is still required to have calibration status readily available.