Floor­care prod­ucts are used in prac­tice for in­creas­ing life­time and main­tain­ing op­ti­cal ap­pear­ance of elas­tic floor­ings. Tem­po­rary coat­ings of elas­tic floor­ings pro­tect them from scratch­es, abra­sion, tracks and im­prove their clean­abil­i­ty. At longer con­tact times, some soil­ings (e.g. io­dine con­tain­ing dis­in­fec­tants, hair tint­ing lo­tions, shoe­pol­ishs, fats and min­er­al oils) mi­grate through ap­plied poly­mer­ic coat­ings into the top layer of floor­ings it­self and floor­ings get ir­repara­bly dam­aged. Fur­ther­more, dis­col­orations can also be caused by ex­chang­ing of plas­ti­ciz­ers be­tween dark col­ored fur­ni­ture glid­ers, car tyres, bi­cylce tyres and elas­tic floor­ings. For avoid­ing ir­repara­ble dam­ages, per­me­at­ing soil­ings have to be re­moved from elas­tic floor­ings im­me­di­ate­ly.

In a re­search wfk-re­search pro­ject two dif­fer­ent so­lu­tions for im­prov­ing bar­ri­er func­tion of poly­mer coat­ings were in­ves­ti­gat­ed. One so­lu­tion based on ex­tend­ing dif­fu­sion path by em­bed­ding in­or­gan­ic bar­ri­er pig­ments in the low­est layer of con­ven­tion­al an­ion­ic poly­mer coat­ing, which is in di­rect con­tact to floor­ing. Typ­i­cal con­ven­tion­al poly­mer coat­ings con­sist of three lay­ers. In the sec­ond ap­proach a cation­ic poly­mer layer was in­te­grat­ed be­tween two lay­ers of com­mer­cial­ly avail­able floor­care prod­ucts with the aim to func­tion as “soil­ing trap”.

Per­me­ation of se­lect­ed soil­ings (es­pe­cial­ly hair tint­ing lo­tions) through con­ven­tion­al poly­mer­ic coat­ings was re­duced by both mod­i­fy­ing the low­est layer with bar­ri­er pig­ments and in­te­grat­ing a cation­ic com­pound. De­tectable soil­ing residues were de­pen­dent on kind of soil­ing, ap­plied con­ven­tion­al floor­care prod­uct, kind and con­cen­tra­tion of bar­ri­er pig­ment, resp. cation­ic poly­mer dis­per­sion.

The de­vel­oped poly­mer coat­ing with bar­ri­er func­tion against per­me­ative soil com­po­nents did not cause changes in bright­ness and color of elas­tic floor­ing. A low re­duc­tion of gloss was ob­served in com­par­i­son to un­mod­i­fied coat­ing. Fur­ther­more, an im­pact on ad­he­sive strength, abra­sion re­sis­tance and slip re­sis­tance was not de­tect­ed.

The IGF-pro­ject 16834 N of the re­search as­so­ci­a­tion Europäische Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft Reini­gungs- und Hy­gien­etech­nolo­gie e.V., Cam­pus Ficht­en­hain 11, D-47807 Krefeld, was sup­port­ed via the AiF with­in the fund­ing pro­gramme „In­dus­trielle Gemein­schafts­forschung und –en­twick­lung (IGF)“ by the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and Tech­nol­o­gy (BMWi) due to a de­ci­sion of the Ger­man Par­lia­ment.

The re­search re­port is avail­able on re­quest from FRT.