Here, a billboard is being prepared with adhesive
for an advertisement. But will the adhesive last?"

Q-Lab is the world leader in weathering test equipment and test services for the adhesives and sealants industry. Many adhesives and sealants are subject to the damaging forces of nature, including sunlight, heat, and moisture, and customers expect excellent long-term durability against the elements.

Will your adhesives and sealants last outdoors? For how long? Do your new environmentally friendly, low VOC formulations meet your customers' performance expectations? Has something changed in your process that might affect your product's long term durability? Don't guess when you can test.

Q-Lab serves hundreds of customers in dozens of industries that deal with adhesives and sealants of all kinds. A small subset of these adhesive and sealants products is shown below:

• Construction adhesives
• Building sealants and caulks
• Automotive adhesives
• Pressure sensitive adhesives
• Hot melt adhesives
• Structural adhesives

The QUV accelerated weathering tester is the weathering device relied on most by the sealants and adhesives industry because of its realistic simulation of the critical short-wave UV portion of sunlight and realistic, aggressive moisture functions. In fact, the name "QUV" is synonymous with "weathering tester" in the adhesives and sealants community. It is The World's Most Widely Used Weathering Tester. For some applications for adhesives and sealants, simulating the full sunlight spectrum is important, making the Q-SUN xenon test chamber another popular choice because of its accurate sunlight simulation and versatile, easy-to-use flat specimen tray.

Q-Lab's accelerated weathering testers simulate the primary weathering conditions that degrade adhesives and sealants outdoors, allowing our customers to accurately reproduce dozens of potential failure modes, including:

• Cracking
• Chalking
• Color change and fading
• Yellowing
• Loss of adhesion
• Shrinkage
• Blistering

While accelerated weathering chambers are a key weapon in the fight against the forces of sunlight, heat, and moisture, nothing beats the real thing: outdoor testing in one of Q-Lab's benchmark outdoor testing facilities. In fact, outdoor testing is so important that large coatings manufacturers began testing in South Florida and Arizona many decades ago and continue to test there today. No weathering program is complete without it. If you want to combine the benefits of outdoor and accelerated testing, the Q-TRAC natural sunlight concentrator can provide five times the annual solar energy of an exposure in South Florida.

Some adhesives and sealants must also withstand the forces of corrosion, and the Q-FOG cyclic corrosion chamber is the perfect tool for recreating realistic industrial or marine corrosion in the laboratory. When you alternate Q-FOG and QUV tester exposures, you obtain the most reliable and realistic weathering and corrosion results available today.

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  Industrial adhesives and tapes are often tested in QUV and Q-SUN weathering testers for loss of adhesion and other failure modes.

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  Outdoor caulks and sealants are often subjected to extreme temperature, moisture, and sunlight conditions.

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  Even indoor caulks and sealants often need to be UV-resistant, since window glass doesn't always filter out all damaging sunlight.



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  The cost of repair due to failures in caulks, sealants, and adhesives can be very high.

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  Do you know if your adhesive formulation will lose strength in hot, humid environments?

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  The synergistic combination of moisture and UV can cause premature failure in hard-to-repair locations.