The Structural Building Components Research Institute (SBCRI) received its ACLASS accreditation certificate on February 6, 2009. ACLASS, an ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board company, is an international accreditation body based in Washington, DC.

SBCRI is a state-of-the-art testing and research facility in Madison that is one of the few facilities that tests structural assemblies as they are actually built and installed in the field. SBCRI offers an extensive list of testing options for accurate and confidential full-scale testing and analysis of a wide variety of construction products in an in situ environment. SBCRI specializes in product development, forensic and industry fundamentals testing.

The type of ACLASS certification SBCRI has received is ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation, which is a very rigorous standard for general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories. In order to comply, SBCRI had to develop and implement a quality manual and related quality policies for the structural testing it is undertaking. In December 2008, an assessor from ACLASS spent two days in SBCRI evaluating its structural testing quality assurance processes.

"The scope of our certification is very broad, which is unique for a testing lab," said Kirk Grundahl, SBCA Executive Director. "SBCRI is ACLASS certified for gravity, uplift, lateral and cyclical loading techniques where we are able to use the traditional ASTM standards for component testing and to undertake full scale assembly testing. The certification allows us the flexibility to test all these set-ups: small-scale components, whole elements, and in situ structures."

The ACLASS certifier was very impressed with SBCRI's quality control process, which is centered around measuring the applied loads from the actuators, watching the load as it moves through the assembly and then measuring all the reaction loads at the foundation. "That's a very powerful testing technique; by definition, loads in must equal loads out, so you find out instantly if the test results are accurate," Grundahl said.