Material Quality / Reliability Testing

Weather durability testing is a necessity for any products that must endure the harsh treatment of Mother Nature. They are exposed to the light from the sun, rain and wind. Plastics gradually crack, and paint colors fade. This phenomenon is referred to as deterioration. UV rays are the greatest cause of product deterioration.

An accelerated weather-durability test artificially recreates outdoor conditions such as light, heat, rain and wind providing a rapid observation of the deterioration process to determine the life of a product. Whether it's the prolonged hot dry sun of Phoenix or the humid, wet irregular sun of Cleveland, EYE Lighting / Iwasaki can provide the best systems to recreate these environmental conditions for repeatable testing.

 

 

Examples of materials benefiting from accelerated weather durability testing

  • Painted Panels, Automobiles, building exteriors

  • Resins, Automobiles, PV panels, buildings, electrical appliances

  • Printed Material, Rubber, artificial stone

 

UV Durability Testing

Regardless of whether your product is paint, ABS plastic, shingles, or laminate materials, the ability to prove durability under extended outdoor exposure is critical. The quality of materials is steadily improving, but the demand for these products to survive prolonged exposure continues to expand. With useful life expectances now reaching beyond 30 years, it is more critical than ever to fully test your product and components to verify durability under extended outdoor exposure. This is difficult to predict without actual data and it is financially impossible to wait 5, 10 or 20 years while this data is acquired. Artificial weather-durability tests have become essential to enable development of materials in a reasonable time frame. However, to develop a product with a 10-year warranty using typical weathering system testers might require one full year of testing. Longer life product requirements have driven the need for Highly Accelerated Life Testing (HALT) systems. To meet the need for this rapid testing EYE Lighting / Iwasaki developed its Super Acceleration UV test system.

The phenomenal speed of the SUV-W151 super acceleration UV chamber makes it an indispensable tool in material development and research. This system provides acceleration factors more than 10 times typical Xenon chambers with the capability to deliver more than 30 times natural sunlight UV energy. The Super UV acceleration chamber can simulate three years of outdoor exposure in approximately nine days of testing. Correlated acceleration factors, greater than 100 times natural solar UV irradiation, provide proven, extended outdoor exposure evaluation testing. Regardless of the product, this system can dramatically reduce testing time, improving quality and profitability.

 

EYE Lighting / Iwasaki Super Acceleration UV Weathering Chamber

The SUV-W151 system intensifies the deterioration acceleration caused by UV rays. Correlated acceleration factors greater than 100 times natural solar UV irradiation provide proven, efficient extended outdoor exposure evaluation testing. Custom spectral filtering cuts UV irradiation below 295nm to replicate natural sunlight and an electronic feedback system ensures constant energy to target material. The system includes a built in data-logger for data storage and simple transfer to common programs such as MS-Excel. All weathering parameters and cycle functions are fully programmable including temperature, humidity, rainfall, UV power, rest (night time), and cycle/duration timing.

 

Features

  • Providing correlated acceleration factors more than 10 times typical weatherometer systems, the Super UV tester greatly increases the efficiency of research and development, quality control and process control of plastic, paint, ink, pigment, textiles and other materials. Uniform irradiation of high intensity ultraviolet light ensures accurate and fast weather durability assessment.

  • Programmable temperature, humidity, rainfall, UV power, rest (night time), and cycle/duration timing.

  • An electronic feedback system provides flexible control of UV irradiation intensity and ensures constant energy to target material and uniform distribution of irradiation.

  • Custom spectral filtering cuts UV irradiation below 295nm to eliminate the negative effect from UV irradiation not present in natural sunlight.

 

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Unprecedented Test Speeds

The Super UV system uses a proprietary high output UV lamp that generates ultraviolet light very efficiently. Its UV irradiation intensity is 30 or more times greater than that of sunlight and conventional weatherometers. For even greater

solar correlation, UV radiation below 295 nm is removed from the light source by a custom filter. Removing this radiation below 295nm, that in natural sunlight does not reach earth, produces accelerated deterioration that more closely resembles outdoor exposure. There is no risk that light of a wavelength not present in sunlight will bias the test results.

 

Typical SUV-W151 Correlation Data

 

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