A NOVEL-APPROACH TO COLOR MATCHING OF AUTOMOTIVE COATINGS

The coatings industry requires a fast and accurate color formulating p rocess. Today the manual/visual color matching procedures are time con suming and require high skills, in particular when metallic and pearle scent colors are involved. For that reason, a new approach to the colo rimetry of paints was followed. This resulted in the development of a system employing an easy to use instrument and powerful software allow ing instant formulation of almost any desired color. The system compri ses a portable multi-angle spectrophotometer in combination with a per sonal computer and dedicated color matching software. Development of b oth the instrument and the software resulted from research on optics, vision science, color mixing properties and computational procedures. In the software new algorithms describing the light-paint interactions (absorption and scattering) and the procedures applied at on site col or matching are imbedded. The system retrieves the optimum paint formu la through fully automated multi-angle spectral measurements followed by an analysis of the spectra and subsequent data bank search. When de sired, correction procedures allow adjustment of the formula through a dditional measurements on a spray out sample.