Manufacturing

Quality Control

Quality control is an integral part of modern manufacturing, involving the testing and verification of materials, processes, and products at key stages of the operation. VOC detection and measurement can play an important part in many of these stages.

ISO 9000 Quality Management, and its related standards (ISO 9001, ISO 9004, and ISO 19011), are among the International Standards Organisation’s best known documents and are widely followed around the world. These set out the basic concepts, terminology, and requirements of quality control systems and provide guidance on making systems more efficient and verifiable.

ISO emphasises the importance of the process approach to quality management rather than prescribing specific procedures to achieve conformity, although there are various sector standards for specific industries which may be prescriptive.

The overall philosophy is that processes should be managed and documented using four steps of ‘plan, do, check, act’. It is important that these steps are documented for subsequent auditing.

Handheld instruments such as the Tiger family from Ion Science can be useful for assessing the quality of raw materials and incoming products, providing a rapid check of volatile organic compound concentrations.

These instruments can detect and quantify VOCs down to concentrations of only 0.001 parts per million (one part per billion) and incorporate powerful data logging functions to meet documentation requirements.

Routine plant management operations including walk-around checks may be used to identify fugitive emissions which could be the first indication of a machinery or process failure. Higher than usual VOC measurements might indicate a failing seal or other breakdown, long before a quality control check on a finished product reveals a problem.

Area wide atmospheric monitoring may also be effective in revealing anomalies. TVOC 2 is a fixed detector for continuous measurement and logging of total VOC content, while Falco is a fixed VOC detector suitable for use in harsh outdoor environments. Both provide always-on monitoring which may be integrated into a process control system and set to raise an alarm at a predetermined threshold.