Development and Deployment of a High Throughput Exterior Durability Program for Architectural Paint Coatings

By Edward A. Schmitt

This article describes a new high throughput system for evaluating the exterior durability of architectural coatings undergoing natural weathering. The motivation for the design and deployment of this system is the ability to better understand the range and distribution of “real world” performances by testing more exposure scenarios than would be possible by traditional means.

The system integrates inventory management, sample handling, and tracking with automated data acquisition, analysis, and archival capabilities including the use of environmental sensors, machine vision, and informatics. One of the unique characteristics of this system is that it not only facilitates the evaluation of more samples per unit time per unit resource compared to traditional methods, but it also produces more objective data per sample analysis.