In short: To benchmark a matting silica against ACEMATT® OK 390, run both in the same resin at the same loading and judge five things side by side: gloss at 60° and 85°, haze and clarity on a clear film, tactile feel, dispersion effort and viscosity, and settling after storage. A single gloss number is not a match; the profile across all five is what decides whether the substitution holds.
Most substitution projects start the same way: somebody reads a gloss figure off a data sheet, finds a grade that lists something similar, and orders it. The trial then fails for a reason that had nothing to do with gloss — the film went hazy, the paste thickened in the mill, or the can needed remixing after four weeks.
That happens because gloss is an outcome, not a property. It falls out of how a particular particle population sits in a particular dried film, at a particular film thickness, in a particular resin. Change the resin or the applicator and the same powder gives you a different number. Two silicas can land on the same 60° gloss and behave nothing alike in every other respect that matters to your line.
So the useful question is not "which grade matches the figure". It is "which grade gives me the same profile across the handful of properties my customer actually notices". That is what a benchmark trial is for.
Fairness comes from changing exactly one thing. Take your current formulation, make two batches identical in every respect, and swap only the matting agent. Same resin batch, same solids, same dispersion equipment, same mill time, same loading by weight, same substrate, same applicator and wet film thickness, same flash-off and cure schedule, same room.
Keep the incumbent running through the whole trial as the control. Do not compare this week's candidate against last quarter's retained panel — resin lots drift, humidity drifts, and the gloss meter may have been recalibrated in between. The control panel has to be drawn down on the same day as the candidate.
Run at least two loadings, not one. A grade that matches at one loading but responds more steeply to a change in dose behaves very differently in production, where dosing is never perfect. The slope of the response tells you how much headroom you have.
Gloss at two angles. Read 60° and 85°. The 60° reading is what most specifications quote; the 85° reading is what the eye picks up as sheen when the panel is viewed at a low angle, and it is where matching most often fails. A candidate that lands on the 60° target but reads higher at 85° will be rejected by the end customer as "shinier", even though the specification says it passed.
Haze and clarity on a clear film. This is the hardest property to match and the fastest way to disqualify a candidate. Apply both over a dark substrate — black panel, dark wood, or a black-and-white contrast card — and look for milkiness in the film. On a pigmented system the effect is hidden; on a clear coat over walnut or a dark lacquer it is the whole ballgame.
Tactile feel. Furniture and interior-trim buyers judge a matt finish with their hand before they judge it with an instrument. Run a fingertip across both panels. Silky, dry, chalky, and slightly rough are four different outcomes that can all sit on the same gloss reading. Have two or three people do it blind and write down what they say.
Dispersion effort and viscosity. Note the mill time needed to reach your normal grind reading, and the viscosity of the finished paste at the temperature your line actually runs at. A candidate that needs longer in the mill, or that thickens the batch, costs you throughput every day even if the panel looks right.
Settling after storage. Fill sealed cans of both and leave them at ambient and at an elevated storage temperature. Check at intervals out to at least a month: does a hard cake form at the bottom, does it redisperse with normal stirring, and does the gloss of a panel drawn from the stored can still match the fresh one? Most substitutions that pass the lab and fail in the field, fail here.
For a waterborne wood or furniture coating, the comparison usually runs between a specially-treated grade intended for water-based systems and an organically-treated grade intended for solvent-based resins. Our own starting point for waterborne work is CENSIL 230W, with CENSIL 525L and CENSIL 560N put alongside it so the trial covers treated and untreated behaviour in the same set.
Send more than one candidate. A benchmark with a single alternative gives you a pass or a fail; a benchmark with three gives you a direction — which way to move along the treatment and structure gradient if the first one lands close but not quite. That is why our sample sets go out as a main grade plus one or two comparison grades rather than a single jar.
Customers regularly benchmark our coating matting grades against products such as Evonik ACEMATT® OK 390 and the W. R. Grace SYLOID® range. Naming those reference points tells you roughly where a grade sits in the market. It is not a claim of equivalence, and we will not make one: fit is established on your line, with your resin, or not at all.
A completed trial is a one-page table: five rows for the properties above, three columns for incumbent, candidate A and candidate B, at two loadings, plus a storage column filled in a month later. Anyone in the business can read it and see whether the substitution is safe.
If the candidate sits inside your tolerance on all five and survives storage, you have a second source. If it matches on four and misses on haze, it is not a substitute for that clear coat — though it may well be the right grade for a pigmented one. That distinction is worth keeping: a grade that fails one benchmark often wins a different job in the same plant.
No, and any supplier who says yes is selling you a data sheet rather than a material. We will tell you which of our grades customers most often put on the bench against it, send the sample set and write the test plan. Whether it is a substitute for your system is decided by your trial.
Enough for two loadings of two candidates plus the control, at laboratory batch size — typically a few hundred grams to a couple of kilograms per grade. Sample material is free of charge for qualified enquiries.
The bench work is one to two days. The storage check is what sets the calendar: a month at ambient and elevated temperature before you commit. Do not shorten it — settling is the failure mode that costs the most to discover in production.
No. A gloss curve is only meaningful with the resin, loading, film thickness and application method it was generated on, and quoting ours would invite exactly the data-sheet matching this article argues against. We issue the current-revision technical data sheet with test methods on request, and we help you generate the curve on your own system.
Third-party product and brand names are the trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify the reference points customers benchmark against. No equivalence, affiliation or endorsement is claimed or implied.
The material you use now, the formulation or resin, the equipment and the target you need to hit. That is enough for us to say whether we have something worth testing.
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