Abrasives

Abrasion can be caused by a variety of airborne particles such as wind blown sand and salts. Abrasion resistance has many manifestations, but can be typified by the effect of blowing sand. As in all aspects of durability, not all pre-finished steel products are the same in their resistance to abrasion. Probably the most visual method of assessing this type of robustness is the falling sand method. This specifies the volume of sand which must fall on the painted surface to cause a specified amount of removal of paint from the surface.

In this case, the thickness of the plastisol coating contributes greatly to its robustness in resisting abrasion.

The rigours of manufacturing a finished system from pre-finished steel are tested by a variety of bending, drawing and impact tests and again not all products behave in the same way. For this reason some pre-finished steel products are more suited to certain applications than others. For example the formation of roof-tile profiles requires both roll-forming and drawing, and therefore places high demands on the coating to remain intact for this application. A very flexible plastisol product is the best choice.