Education

QFS-40 and UVB-313EL lamps are both used in QUV accelerated weathering testers to provide fluorescent UV light that includes a significant UVB component for faster testing. The diagram below shows that both have similarly-shaped spectral power distri...

Are you ready to start your first weathering or corrosion test program but aren’t sure how the process works? Don't worry – Q-Lab is here to make it simple for you! Here are a few important tips to get things rolling.The first step is to contact us. ...

Cyclic corrosion testing is intended to be a more realistic way to perform salt spray tests than traditional, steady state exposures. Because actual atmospheric exposures usually include both wet and dry conditions, it makes sense to pattern accelera...

The Big Payback on Weathering & Light Stability Testing: Quite often, weathering and light stability testing yields huge returns on investment. Here's our list of the top 10 returns you can get from a relatively modest outlay on testing.Avoid Cat...

Corrosion is caused when a metal is in contact with water and an electrolyte, such as a salt. In this corrosive environment, metals react to form metal oxides. Except for noble metals such as gold, silver, and platinum, all metals exist as oxides in ...

Q-Lab’s accelerated weathering and corrosion testers all have some method(s) for measuring and controlling temperature, including black panel thermometers (BPT) and chamber air temperature (CAT) sensors. Reliable test results depend on accurate calib...

The Q-TRAC natural sunlight concentrator is a fast, powerful way to conduct accelerated lightfastness and weathering testing using actual sunlight instead of artificial sources. The Q TRAC system is useful for testing a range of products including co...

In accelerated weathering testing, water is often the most difficult factor to accelerate. You cannot make water sit on a panel “faster” in a tester than in the real world. Since many materials outdoors will be wet for 8 to 12 hours a day, an acceler...

ASTM E3006, Standard Practice for Ultraviolet Conditioning of Photovoltaic Modules or Mini-Modules Using a Fluorescent Ultraviolet (UV) Lamp Apparatus, has been revised with a 2020 publication date. Originally published in 2015, E3006 was written to ...