Case study: Wheathering of paints and coatings

Q-Lab is the world leader in weathering test equipment and test services for the paint and coatings industry. Exterior paints and coatings are subject to the damaging forces of nature, including sunlight, heat, and moisture, and customers expect excellent long-term durability against the elements.

Will your paints last outdoors? For how long? Do your new environmentally friendly, low VOC formulations meet your customers' performance expectations? Has something changed in your process that might affect your product's long term durability? Don't guess when you can test.

The paint and coatings industry is extremely diverse. Q-Lab serves thousands of customers in hundreds of sub-markets that utilize paints and coatings, including the following applications:

• Architectural coatings
• Industrial and maintenance coatings
• Automotive coatings
• Exterior stains and varnishes
• Coil coatings
• Powder coatings
• Low VOC coatings
• Marine coatings
• Wood coatings
• Roof coatings
• Cool and IR reflective coatings
• Additives
• Pigments

The QUV accelerated weathering tester is the weathering device relied on most by the coatings industry because of its realistic simulation of the critical short-wave UV portion of sunlight and realistic, aggressive moisture functions. In fact, the name "QUV" is synonymous with "weathering tester" in the coatings community. It is The World's Most Widely Used Weathering Tester. For some coatings applications, simulating the full sunlight spectrum is important, making the Q-SUN xenon test chamber another popular choice because of its accurate sunlight simulation and versatile, easy-to-use flat specimen tray.

Q-Lab's accelerated weathering testers simulate the primary weathering conditions that degrade paints and coatings outdoors, allowing our customers to accurately reproduce dozens of potential failure modes, including:

• Color change and fading
• Yellowing
• Cracking
• Erosion
• Delamination and loss of adhesion
• Gloss loss
• Chalking
• Blistering

While accelerated weathering chambers are a key weapon in the fight against the forces of sunlight, heat, and moisture, nothing beats the real thing: outdoor testing in one of Q-Lab's benchmark outdoor testing facilities. In fact, outdoor testing is so important that large coatings manufacturers began testing in South Florida and Arizona many decades ago and continue to test there today. No weathering program is complete without it. If you want to combine the benefits of outdoor and accelerated testing, the Q-TRAC natural sunlight concentrator can provide five times the annual solar energy of an exposure in South Florida.

Coatings on metals must also withstand the forces of corrosion, and the Q-FOG cyclic corrosion chamber is the perfect tool for recreating realistic industrial or marine corrosion in the laboratory. When you alternate Q-FOG and QUV tester exposures, you obtain the most reliable and realistic weathering and corrosion results available today.

Color change and fading is one of the more important characteristics evaluated during weather testing of paints.

Q-PANEL is the world's leading brand of standard substrates for the paint industry.

Paint samples are shown here undergoing rigorous UV and condensation testing in a QUV accelerated weathering tester.

Painted Q-PANEL substrates, featuring the Q-shaped hole. It's our trademark and your assurance of quality.

These different paint samples all look the same, but will they perform the same under accelerated colorfastness testing?

The combination of sunlight, moisture and temperature can be devastating to the durability of paints, varnishes, and other coatings.