Document Library

For many applications it is important to measure how well plastics parts resist degradation and colour change when exposed to temperature changes, moisture, and light – especially ultraviolet (UV) light. Examples include building materials, automotiv...

Understanding how to best protect a plastic part from the effects of weathering needs to include an analysis of several important factors. It should take account of the polymer type, colour and additives. An estimation of what the actual exposure wil...

The basic stresses in weathering are known and quantified. The time a material is stressed and the temperature during UV and water stresses are the primary variables in natural weathering. Reproducing them exactly in the laboratory can provide accele...

Continual demands from consumers for highly durable coatings with excellent appearance motivate automotive manufactures and paint suppliers to introduce new coating systems into the marketplace to meet those demands. However, because of the potential...

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) has recently approved two new performance-based weathering test methods to replace the older hardware based methods. The new methods describe the exposure conditions and control tolerances rather than describ...

Instrumental color (i.e. L*A*B*) and optical density measurements were performed on coated and uncoated papers printed with water based inkjet inks using continuous binary array inkjet equipment. Lightfastness tests were performed in a QUV test chamb...

Sunlight is an important cause of damage to materials exposed outdoors. The shorter the wavelength of sunlight, the greater the damage. The shortest wavelengths in sunlight are the ultraviolet. Although ultraviolet light makes up only about 5% of the...

This paper is intended as a general introduction to cyclic corrosion testing (CCT). It outlines the rationale for cyclic testing, includes some guidelines for using cyclic tests and explains some common CCT cycles and their applications. This discuss...

Outdoor exposure racks and accelerated chambers are the two main methods for testing materials for weathering durability. In the fast paced current world, time constraints have determined that outdoor weathering exposures take too long to provide the...

In the 1980s, damage to automotive coatings from acid rain became a problem. Both dealerships and buyers complained about the ring type or “water spot” etches that were caused by acid catalyzed hydrolysis in areas where acid rain occurred and tempera...