Romil has become the first European commercial producer of elemental certified reference materials to be accredited to ISO 17025 as a calibration laboratory
Romil has become the first European commercial producer of elemental certified reference materials (CRMs) to be accredited to ISO 17025 as a calibration laboratory.
This award gives Romil the authority to certify reference materials and to market Romil PrimAg CRMs bearing the Ukas (United Kingdom Accreditation Service) logo.
"The demand for properly SI-traceable certified reference materials has grown rapidly, as ISO 17025 is adopted as a quality standard by both European and Global analytical laboratories", says Robert Lenk, founder and managing director of Romil.
He comments: "Until now there has been no way for most laboratories to source affordable, fully SI-traceable CRMs for analytical calibration.
Our accreditation makes it possible for us to certify our PrimAg range of CRMs so that they meet all the requirements of labs working to ISO 17025".
The most important feature of PrimAg CRMs is that they require no further analytical validation to demonstrate traceability to the SI.
The need to use CRMs that are traceable to an SI unit is written into ISO 17025.
For analytical chemists this unit is the mole.
Before the introduction of PrimAg CRMs, generally the only available solution element CRMs that provided traceability to the mole were those produced by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, Nist.
Outside the USA, supply tended to be unreliable and prices high.
Now, Romil PrimAg CRMs ensure analysts have a ready supply of fully SI-traceable CRMs for trace element calibration at a price that is no more than the non-traceable analytical standards produced by the general laboratory reagent companies.
"To certify PrimAg CRMs we use an unbroken chain of comparisons to a sample of very pure silver, effectively a 'practical mole'" explains Dr Lenk.
"This concept of silver traceability has been established within the central analytical laboratories of a number of leading European chemical manufacturers for almost a century; Romil is the first to recognise the benefits this concept will bring to the wider laboratory market" he added. He went on to say that Romil would be extending and developing the concept to offer fully traceable analytical reagents for use in many more critical applications.
