Testing for New Requirements for Building Coatings

Coatings are an important part of buildings in terms of performance, costs and time needed to be applied, repaired and replaced. They are requested to perform several functions, starting with the protection of the substrates and, therefore, durability of the coated building elements. With the increased concern on ecological performance, energy conservation and economic efficiency, the durability of the coatings themselves and several innovative requirements, such as contributing to lightning, comfort, health (indoors and outdoors) and safety, are also very important nowadays. Therefore, innovative tests have recently been defined, usually designed to reproduce the real actions while other tests have been adapted from tests designed for other materials. The new tests have to be optimized and validated before being formally adopted. This chapter addresses several building coating requirements, namely some which only recently are attracting research. Many innovative tests to assess new requirements and tests that were adapted to properly assess coatings performance are described and are briefly discussed to contribute to advances in research and to the identification of gaps.