As part of a recent three-day East Coast trip with PCI’spublisher, I had the chance to visit the Dow Coatings Materials (DCM) facility in Spring House, PA. The highlight of our visit was a tour of the company’s 6½-acre field of testing panel exposure stations. The company has 20 sites globally that perform panel testing, with seven in the United States. The Spring House site, located at an old farm that is over 100 years old, is the company’s largest panel testing location. Our tour guides for the morning were DCM’s John Calderaio, Exposure Station Manager, and David Fasano, Senior Scientist.
Before we even entered the panel exposure area, John pointed out that many surfaces that we could see surrounding the farmhouse building were also being tested. This included the asphalt walkway and footbridge next to the building, another coated walkway alongside the building, and the concrete roof tiles on part of the farmhouse. Even inside the panel test site I could see that no surface area was wasted – panels were being tested on the underside of some of the testing rack soffits.