Things to Consider

• Specimen Preparation: How test specimens are prepared can influence test results. Specimens should be 'conditioned' for at least 24 hours in the test atmosphere. Organic materials should be conditioned for 48 hours. If you must interrupt a test for several hours (or overnight), we recommend discarding and beginning a new test.
  
  
• Environmental Conditions: Both heat and moisture can affect the physical properties of most materials. We recommend performing all tests in a controlled environment. For most materials this is 70 - 75°F with 50% relative humidity.
  
  
• Static Electricity: Failure to ensure specimens are clean and free of static electricity, may impact the test results.
  
  
• Test Reports: For testing to be meaningful, the data you generate should be useful and easy to understand. A test report should be part of each test, and include detailed notes of the product being tested, operator, environmental conditions, date and test results.
  
  
• Variation in Material: A single test may indicate your material's physical properties (i.e. resistance to abrasion or scratch), but it should never be accepted as the final answer. A minimum of 3 - 5 tests should be completed for any given material, and the average result taken to represent the results.
  
  
• Abradant too Harsh: When performing accelerated wear tests with a Taber Abraser, the load and wheel combination should run on a specimen a minimum of 300 cycles before the end point occurs. Otherwise, the test may be too harsh.
  
  
• Variation in Abradants: Abrasion tests are subject to variation due to changes in the abradant during the test. Ensure that wheels or other abradants are refaced properly and often enough.
  
  
• Test Set-Up: Conditions of the test greatly affect resistance to abrasion; nature of abradant, tension of specimen (if flexible material), pressure between specimen and abradant, dimensional changes in specimens, etc. For optimal results, it is best to control and monitor all factors that can influence testing.

Accelerated testing is performed to avoid the months or years required for actual use. Ideally, test results should be correlated with field observations. However, it is often the case that materials degrade faster with the more demanding conditions of accelerated testing. Often the mode of failure will not resemble the product in actual use. When parameters that affect the testing are identified and controlled, the confidence level in the test results is extremely high. Should you experience difficulties in setting up your test, please CONTACT US.