As the global leader in photodegradation and weathering testing instrument and service innovations, Atlas offers the most complete range of durability testing solutions for polymer and plastic materials and products.
As one of the most widely used manmade materials, polymers and plastics span a diverse range of material chemistries and properties. As such, they can range from relatively short lifespans, such as packaging materials, to long lived severe service applications such as building materials.
Also, most plastic products are formulated with various colorants and functional or performance enhancing additives. Because of these, polymer degradation chemistry and product weathering results can be highly specific to not only the service environment, base resin chemistry, compound formulation and processing, but also to the accuracy, uniformity, repeatability and reproducibility of the test exposure device. In particular, accelerated laboratory durability testing for demanding, high performance applications such as automotive requires high performance testing instruments to reliably predict service lifetimes or pass exacting specifications. Atlas lightfastness and weathering instruments lead the industry in testing performance and are frequently specified by name and model by OEMs, with many test methods having been specifically designed around their capabilities.
Atlas provides a variety of outdoor natural and accelerated weathering exposures for material and product testing. In addition to benchmark test sites, Atlas can provide exposures through our Worldwide Exposure Network of over 20 affiliated test sites. Artificial weathering is performed at Atlas’ commercial labs in the US and Germany.