Appearance of Materials
How a product looks can be one of the most critical parameters affecting customer choice and hence the success of products in the marketplace. To ensure uniformity and reproducibility of desirable features, the appearance of a product needs to be quantifiable. NPL offers a range of measurement services related to the appearance characteristics of a surface, which can be tailored to individual customer requirements. Clients come from a diverse range of industries including packaging; construction; manufacturing; security; design and media; coatings and paints; personal healthcare; and materials testing.
Appearance characterisation includes measurements of colour, texture, gloss, haze, and combinations of these. Full hemispherical multi-angular and multi-spectral (300 nm – 800 nm) measurements are available for uniform and non-uniform surfaces, which are coupled with robust image analysis and classification algorithms to facilitate full description of complex surfaces.
The Appearance team at NPL recently led a multi-disciplinary EU-funded project on the Measurement of Naturalness (MONAT). This combines our expertise in optical and materials measurement with image analysis, classification and regression techniques in order to provide a robust solution to the complex problem of understanding perceived naturalness. The new instrumentation and techniques developed within this project can be applied to other parameters and materials, under NPL's consultancy services.