Automotive Industry Gloss Meter

By Author: Pravinda Fernando11
Total Articles: 1
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The automotive industry invests in delivering quality products with gloss and color levels that have maximum appeal to end customers. Gloss levels vary from mirror finish chrome parts to very mat "soft touch" internal plastics. The automotive interior design is getting more and more important in the purchasing decision. A big challenge for every car manufacturer is to achieve a "feeling" of high value and at the same time minimize cost. A variety of materials from leather to plastics, are used in the automotive field and need to be harmonized for color and gloss. A design team specifies the color, gloss and grain. Once a new color or material or process are approved, a new "style" is born, ready for implementation. In order to guarantee a uniform look among the various gloss levels in automotive parts, very tight tolerances are specified. Typical automotive gloss tolerances using a standard 60 degree gloss meter with gloss levels under 5 GU can be 0.3 or 0.5 GU. Visual assessment is impossible with these tight color and gloss tolerances.

As a starting point, master standard plaques are manufactured by the ...
... automotive customer with usually a flat and several grained areas. These are sent to the automotive suppliers as their gloss target to achieve with actual production parts.

As the master plaques and final parts are often made of different materials, the suppliers work closely with the automotive maker. At the end, the final approval on color and gloss are given on the automotive production part. This automotive production part now becomes the color and gloss standard for the supplier. Instead of working with absolute gloss numbers from the supplier production standard, QC needs to be based on the signed-off part. This procedure eliminates the reproducibility error as gloss is measured relatively on the sample type of material and same surface.

Since visual assessment of gloss is impossible one must use a digital gloss meter. Special gloss meters from TE2 with excellent precision are able to objectively control the production parts.

Two new methods for improved performance using gloss meters are now available to improve the accuracy and repeatability when measuring in the critical 60 degree low gloss range of 0 to 10 GU levels.

Pravinda Fernando is Australian Author. TE2 is a leading test equipment supplier in Australia. He has applied his knowledge and understanding to a wide variety of Gloss Meters and Gloss Meter test equipment supplier.