Standardization News

ASTM Staff Attends Standards Meetings in Abu Dhabi

ASTM staff members Teresa Cendrowska, vice president, global cooperation, and James Olshefsky. director of external relations, attended a series of meetings during a trip to Abu Dhabi in September. Among the many meetings were the following:

• A meeting with representatives from the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) to review past successful collaborations and consider topics of mutual interest for future programming. 
• A meeting with Zoran Glomazic and Rada Janjíc, directors with the Institute for Standardization of Montenegro (ISME). ISME has been an ASTM MoU partner since 2015. A memorandum of understanding signing between ASTM and the Sudanese Standards and Metrology Organization (SSMO). This is ASTM’s 122nd MOU.
• Olshefsky met with Kibowa Rashid, director of trade, and Stella Apolot, principal standards officer, both from the East African Community (EAC).
• Director General Phyu Phyu Win of Myanmar’s Department of Research and Innovation to review the ASTM/DRI memorandum of understanding and actions for further collaboration.

ASTM Signs Memorandum of Understanding with Mexican National Standards Body

ASTM International signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) and commercial agreement with the Mexican National Standardization and Certification Organization for Building and Construction (ONNCCE), one of Mexico’s largest standards-development organizations. The agreement was signed by Arq. Evangelina Hirata, director general of ONNCCE, and Kathie Morgan, president of ASTM.

The MoU’s stated goals include promoting ASTM’s technical standards internationally, fostering collaboration with Mexican stakeholders in development and use of standards, and educating students and professors abroad on the topic.

“It is our hope that ONNCCE and ASTM will have increased opportunities to work together to support innovation, competitiveness, sustainability, and climate resilience, through standards that reflect technical quality, market relevance, and suitability,” said Morgan. “The chance to help foster technology transfer, promote safety, and support economic growth for the construction industry is a great opportunity for all of us.”

“This collaboration will support standardizing the characteristics and evaluation methods of construction products in the region, benefiting the construction industry by strengthening infrastructure quality and easing international trade,” says Hirata. “Greater knowledge will be extended among builders and manufacturers, among others, which will help improve the content and scope of Mexico’s standards.”

The MoU’s signing follows the 2021 signing of a similar agreement with DGN, Mexico’s General Bureau of Standards, and means that ASTM now has 34 MoU partners in the Americas and Caribbean.

National Science Foundation Project to Support ASTM Additive Manufacturing Consortium

A new U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) research project to Southern University, Louisiana State University, and Auburn University is expected to contribute significantly to ASTM International’s newly established Consortium on Materials Data & Standardization (CMDS).

The newly funded $4 million NSF EPSCoR award is to conduct research on rapid qualification for additively manufactured (AM) critical components used in key industries including the aviation, space, and medical industries.

“NSF is excited to witness the transition of a fundamental research to applied, aligned with the current need of the industry,” says Subrata Acharya, Ph.D., program officer, NSF. “We have a mission to progress the science and engineering fields and we value bridging academic institutes and the 
AM industry.”

“Lacking in-depth knowledge of additive manufacturing process-structure-property (PSP) relationships, current part qualification efforts are component-testing heavy, time consuming, and account for over 50% of production cost,” noted Patrick Mensah, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs, Southern University and A&M College.

The research generated under this project will help establish a rapid qualification framework for AM parts, based on experimental and simulation databases of PSP relationships that will support expedited adoption of these technologies across critical applications.

ASTM’s Additive Manufacturing Center of Excellence (AM CoE) recently launched the CMDS initiative. The effort brings together key organizations from across the entire AM value stream to collaborate on standardization requirements for AM materials data generation supporting qualification and certification.

“The ASTM CMDS approach is particularly focused on determining key PSP relationships necessary to develop methods for generating machine-agnostic materials data, and this NSF-funded project is well aligned with this approach,” says Mohsen Seifi, Ph.D., ASTM’s vice president of global advanced manufacturing programs.

“The goal of the project is to address current challenges related to exhaustive data-driven qualification practices, transferability of the data, and correlating material property data to part performance for additive manufacturing processes,” noted Nima Shamsaei, Ph.D., director of the National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence and professor of mechanical engineering at Auburn University. “The project outcomes are to provide the industry with a much needed rapid, prediction-based qualification strategy.”

Mensah and Shamsaei join Shengmin Guo, Ph.D., professor of mechanical engineering at Louisiana State University, and Shuai Shao, Ph.D., associate professor of mechanical engineering at Auburn University, as Co-PI’s of the project.

Jim Olshefsky, director of external relations, ASTM; and Teresa Cendrowska, vice president, global cooperation, ASTM, meet with executives from the Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) to review past successful collaborations and to consider topics of mutual interest. Pictured L to R: James Olshefsky, Yonghyun Lee; director of international standards cooperation division, and administrator Sanghoon Lee, both of KATS; Teresa J. Cendrowska, and Amer Bin Ahmed, ASTM’s Board of Directors.

While in Abu Dhabi, ASTM’s Teresa Cendrowska signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Sudanese Standards and Metrology Organization (SSMO). Pictured are Cendrowska and SSMO’s acting director general Rahba Saeed A. Mohamed, signing ASTM’s 122nd MoU.