World Standards Day 2021 - Standardization boosts innovation

Since 1970, World Standards Day is celebrated each year on October 14. On this day in 1946, representatives of national standards organizations from 25 countries met in London to establish an international organization to facilitate standardization. This conference gave rise a year later to ISO, which has since published standards for technical specifications, nomenclature and processes, with the aim of simplifying and strengthening trade through trust.

The importance of standardization work can be seen clearly in the current example of e-mobility. Its widespread introduction represents a major challenge. It requires international systems thinking on the part of the participating domains of automotive engineering, electrical engineering and energy technology, as well as information and communications technology. An important hurdle was already cleared with the Europe-wide agreement on a standardized charging plug. In order to ensure a high level of compatibility and thus be able to expand the charging infrastructure more efficiently, the Type 2 plug for pure AC charging and the CCS extension for DC fast charging were introduced in Europe. They are now used in most electric cars and public charging stations and can thus charge almost any electric car. An important step for the spread and acceptance of this important technology.

In order to achieve the EU Commission's envisaged target of only permitting new zero-emission cars from 2035, there is still a lot of work to be done, including defining the interfaces between the various systems. To protect against grid overloads, the charging infrastructure, vehicles and power grid must communicate with each other permanently in order to intelligently distribute power requirements and display availability. This also requires open and standardized interfaces that enable provider-independent data exchange. The exchange of information between charging stations and billing systems is also not yet standardized. Since many of the charging stations are operated by local electricity providers, there are currently still different tariffs and payment systems, which complicates use for users. This also requires a set of internationally applicable norms and standards.

As the case of e-mobility shows, international norms and standards can generally promote the interoperability of the industries and systems involved, accelerate development processes and at the same time maintain a high level of quality. For users, this ensures safe, convenient and, above all, unrestricted use, which in turn increases broad acceptance of new technologies. From an investor's point of view, standards also offer a high level of security for investments.

Generally speaking, in engineering or product development, standards have an important role to play in terms of legal requirements and cost-effectiveness. Standardized components are not only significantly cheaper than in-house manufactured parts, they are also available at any time and without complications. Therefore, it is a decisive competitive advantage for engineers to increase the density of standardized parts. With the search engine for technical components 3DfindIT.com as well as the Strategic Parts Management PARTsolutions by CADENAS, 3D CAD catalogs can be filtered by standards, if the manufacturers enriched their product catalog with this valuable information.

Click here for an overview of the available standards on 3DfindIT.com.