POLISH UP YOUR GLOSS MEASUREMENTS AT NIST.

The glossy surface on a shiny new car is more than just eye candy--in car paints, for example, the quality of the gloss tends to correlate with the durability of the finish. Shine, or properly "specular gloss," is the perception of a mirror-like surface. The glossiness of a surface is second only to color as the most important attribute of products such as automotive coatings, textiles and papers.

To help manufacturers monitor and assess specular gloss, NIST has launched a new Special Test Service to calibrate gloss reference standards. Gloss measurement is not straightforwardit is determined relative to a standard, generally in a polished piece of black glass, and depends on experimental conditions such as spectral distribution of the light, incident and viewing angles. A variety of standard geometries are used to determine the specular gloss of materials. These are selected based on their ability to produce optimum discrimination between samples and to correlate with visual rankings.

The NIST facility is built around a newly rebuilt reference goniophotometer--an instrument that measures light flux as a function of angles of illumination or observation--and a newly created primary gloss standard (three wedges of highly polished, high-quality optical glass). The new service offers calibration measurements of industry working gloss standards at the specular geometries of 20[degrees], 60[degrees] and 85[degrees], in compliance with ISO 2813 and ASTM D523 documentary standards.

For details, contact Maria Nadal, [phone]. An online index of other NIST calibration services for optical radiation may be found on the World Wide Web at http://ts.nist.gov/ts/htdocs/230/233/calibration/users/users7.html.