ABSTRACT
The scratch test is routinely used for testing the strength of adhesion of a coating to its substrate. The most usual test (at least for thin hard coatings) consists of generating scratches by progressively loading a diamond stylus that is drawn across the surface of the coating-substrate system being tested [1-3]. A progressive series of coating failures may be observed consecutively in the scratch track, at increasing critical load (Lc) values. Although different coating-substrate systems fail in different ways [4], these failures are reproducible. As a consequence, the European Standards Committee CEN TC184 WG5 has established a European Standard prEN 1071-3 for the scratch test [5], which defines standard calibration, cleaning and test procedures.
