ENAC has recently granted accreditation according to ISO 17025 to the manufacturer VYC Industrial’s laboratory. It’s a company with extensive experience in designing, manufacturing and marketing fluid regulation and interception valves. Specifically, the company has received ENAC accreditation for tests carried out by its laboratory on its safety valves, becoming the first accredited body for testing safety devices for protecting against excessive pressure in accordance with ISO-4126-1.

In this interview, Miquel Espí Pumarola, General Manager at VYC Industrial, addresses the reasons that led them to request accreditation for this type of tests.

Why did the company decide to choose accreditation for these tests?

VYC Industrial, founded in 1914, is one of the pioneers in the study and manufacture of all types of fluid interception and regulation valves and, especially, safety valves in Spain.

In order to obtain the CE marking, safety valves are covered by the ISO-4126-1 standard that requires manufacturers to carry out type tests prior to the standardization of the manufacturing process.

There was no laboratory in all of Spain accredited to carry out this type of test. We were in contact with universities, testing laboratories, national export institutes, manufacturers' associations, etc., and expressed our concern. Spain is a power in valve manufacturing, and we did not understand this vacuum. No one gave us a solution.

With the large volume of tests carried out in your laboratory, do you consider continuing with accreditation to give maximum guarantees to your manufacturing processes and to your customers? Given the high cost of the facilities, it is possible to extend our ENAC accreditation according to the needs of our customers and collaborators. We believe that actions like this help us improve day by day and enable us to compete with an advantage against the elite global manufacturers. Not surprisingly, today, after consulting with accrediting bodies, we do not know of another safety valves manufacturer worldwide that has a similar certification.

Now, VYC industrial is the only ENAC-accredited laboratory that certifies, with gas as a test fluid, following the testing guidelines of the UNE-EN ISO 4126-1 standard on safety valves, the results of real discharge flow, discharge coefficient (Kd) and reduced discharge coefficient (Kdr).

What are the benefits of having an accredited in-house laboratory for a manufacturer such as VYC Industrial?

Before, we outsourced the tests abroad where we could choose qualitatively very different options. We always chose the most reliable option, but it was very expensive and seemed like a protectionist tariff.

Moreover, although this option enabled us to certify our valves, it did not enable us to optimize our designs. We were looking for a tool to support our R+D process that would permit us to correct our simulation programs to the highest levels of perfection, combine simulations and real results, correct, rehearse again, and so on, until the product is optimized.

We set up a roadmap and in collaboration with Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña we designed our own fluid dynamic testing laboratory. Now, we carry out functional and performance testing, at high pressures with large steam, air, or water flows as a test fluid, becoming the only accredited laboratory in Spain and, without a doubt, one of the most complete in the world for carrying out these tests for testing any fluid vehicle element, mainly in valves and, especially, for safety valves.

It is a service that has not been designed only for our needs, but we try to give a solution to all those who need to validate per se or for third parties real-test testing.

With the large volume of tests carried out in your laboratory, do you consider continuing with accreditation to give maximum guarantees to your manufacturing processes and to your customers?

Given the high cost of the facilities, it is possible to extend our ENAC accreditation according to the needs of our customers and collaborators.

We believe that actions like this help us improve day by day and enable us to compete with an advantage against the elite global manufacturers. Not surprisingly, today, after consulting with accrediting bodies, we do not know of another safety valves manufacturer worldwide that has a similar certification.