Improved mechanical resistance is part of many quality requirements. One important criteria for assessing this feature is hardness. Depending on the requirements there are various Hardness Testers to choose from.

Some are dedicated to characterise coatings and others are more suitable for testing bulk materials such as metals, plastics, rubber or elastomers.

Elcometer manufacture and supply a wide range of instrumentation designed for the hardness tests most frequently used in the industry – these include pendulum, scratching, indentation or rebound measuring methods.

Scratch Resistance: To assess a coating’s resistance to scratch there are a number of different instruments that can be used: Pencil Hardness Tester (Wolff-Wilborn), Sclerometer, Clemen Apparatus, Scratching and Shearing Instrument.

Resistance to Indentation: There are many instruments available to assess the resistance to penetration. For coatings in particular, there are three common methods where the depth of penetration of a weighted tool is used to show the coating’s resistance to penetration: Buchholz, Barcol, Shore.