Product Qualification requirement for flooring

ESD Control Program Auditing
#1

Hello: We are reviewing the Product Qualification Report that the manufacturer of the flooring we installed sent us.

We saw that ANSI/ESD S20.20-2021 in the last paragraph of section 7.3 says “Product qualification shall be completed for each footwear and flooring type combination used by the Organization”. For your reference, as a personal grounding method we use heel straps.

The supplier’s report does not cover this requirement, the report is from 2020; we would like to ask the manufacturer of the flooring to add a sentence to the report to cover the requirement of this paragraph, but we are having a debate on whether this paragraph refers to one of these options:

  1. The type of material the heel straps we use were made of
  2. The brand of heel pads we use
    Please confirm that a Product Qualification report must be added to comply with the last paragraph of section 7.3 of the standard.

In addition to the above, we contacted the manufacturer of the sole to confirm which grounding method they used in their Product Qualification Test; they comment that the test was done only with Sole grounders (covering the entire bottom of the shoe) and that complying with the standard with this footwear system, and that also guarantees the proper functioning of the flooring when we are using heel pads. Is that correct?

Beforehand, thanks for your help with these two doubts, and we looked forward to hearing from you.

Best Regards

Mike :vulcan_salute:

#2

Mike,

The resistance and voltage requirements for a footwear/flooring system in table 2 of ANSI/ESD S20.20 require the factory to ensure that every combination of footwear and flooring you have is tested together. In your case it sounds like you have one flooring type and one type of footwear (heel straps). It is very unlikely that any flooring (or footwear) manufacturer would have the product qualification data for the footwear/flooring resistance (ANSI/ESD STM97.1) or walking voltage (ANSI/ESD STM97.2) tests as they wouldn’t know what type of footwear (or flooring) you may choose.

These tests are usually arranged by the factory seeking the certification by sending samples of the flooring and footwear to a lab to perform the testing. ANSI/ESD S20.20 also allows these tests to be performed in the factory at the lowest annual humidity. If you need to do the footwear/floor resistance and walking voltage tests but cannot wait until the time of year where the humidity is the lowest (for instance, in the winter), you could create a testing plan, where you complete product qualification measurements over a period of time until you capture data at the lowest annual humidity.

If you need help performing these footwear/flooring tests, there are many ESD consulting services out there including the ESDA’s LLC (EOS/ESD Association Services, LLC | EOS/ESD Association, Inc.). Hope this helps.