Southwest Research Institute^® (SwRI^®) News

Extraction facility, laboratories available at Southwest Research Institute

San Antonio -- January 20, 2003 -- A 7,000-square-foot facility for chemical extraction, Network Equipment/Building Systems (NEBS) testing, and other services is available at Southwest Research Institute^® (SwRI^®). The renovated building updates and improves the SwRI Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division's environmental sample preparation facility, centralizing the laboratories and equipment and enhancing client testing and analysis services.

"We are very excited about this new facility," said Dr. Reza Karimi, director of the Analytical and Environmental Chemistry Department. "The renovation will help us streamline and increase productivity and precision, and will help our clients meet their schedules for getting their product to the market more quickly. It has given us the opportunity to modernize and add new equipment and the latest technology."

NEBS testing, a telecommunications industry preproduction requirement, evaluates how equipment performs under various physical and electrical operating conditions. The Institute provides NEBS and environmental testing in the areas of temperature and humidity, fire, electromagnetic compatibility, electrical, seismic, acoustic, and others. The facility has improved the laboratory used for NEBS corrosion testing.

The newly centralized extraction facility allows the Institute to increase its capacity and efficiency for preparing samples for phase analysis. SwRI staff members use the laboratory to extract pollutants for organic analysis and environmental testing of client samples.

"We felt that bringing the extraction facility into one centralized location would increase productivity for our clients," Karimi said. "We will be able to expand the number of samples we have in the preparation phase of analysis and still effectively handle our workload and address future demands."

The Institute has added two new, side-by-side walk-in coolers for refrigeration. Currently, the Institute processes 15,000 to 20,000 samples a year. To effectively handle this workload, the building also has a login area to maintain strict chain of custody of each sample and ensure it is properly stored, sorted and eventually disposed. A laboratory information management system helps maintain this process with bar-coding capabilities.

SwRI's Analytical and Environmental Chemistry Department recently earned certification under the National Environmental Accreditation Laboratory Program (NELAP). NELAP is a national program that implements standards set by the National Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Conference (NELAC), a voluntary association of state and federal agencies that sets standards for environmental laboratories. The Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division is also certified to ISO 9002, an internationally recognized quality standard.

For more information, visit the SwRI Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Division web site at chemistry.swri.org.