Chlo­rine-free floor ma­te­ri­als at­tain more and more at­trac­tion. The mar­ket-in­tro­duc­tion of poly­ole­fine-floor­ings was in the early 90th. While using these floors some dis­ad­van­tages ap­peared. Es­pe­cial­ly the high abra­sion of this sys­tems re­sult in non ac­cept­able op­ti­cal ap­pear­ance of these sur­faces.

To solve the prob­lems some man­u­fac­tur­ers equipped the poly­ole­fine-sur­faces with polyurethane-coat­ings. These show a high­er me­chan­i­cal sta­bil­i­ty and clean­abil­i­ty. But they do not reach the typ­i­cal life­time of a floor cov­er­ing by far. Fur­ther­more the restora­tion of such coat­ings is not pos­si­ble. A ren­o­va­tion of the sur­face by bur­nish­ing and spray buff­ing is not suit­able be­cause polyurethane is a non-ther­mo­plas­tic ma­te­ri­al. Re-coat­ing was not pos­si­ble till now due to the hy­dropho­bic char­ac­ter of the non-po­lar poly­ole­fine.

The main­te­nance ex­pen­di­ture in­creas­es, there­fore the costs for at­trac­tive clean­ing re­sults are ex­ten­sive­ly high­er than for con­ven­tion­al floor­ings.

The im­prove­ments of the care prop­er­ties of non-po­lar floor­ings did start with a mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the poly­ole­fine sur­face for the in­crease of the sur­face en­er­gy of the non-coat­ed floor ma­te­ri­al. Chem­i­cal re­ac­tions of poly­ole­fine-sur­faces in the pres­ence of var­i­ous ozone gas con­cen­tra­tions were stud­ied.

The ex­po­sure of the poly­mer sur­face was car­ried out in a lab­o­ra­to­ry-scale re­ac­tor in which the fol­low­ing pa­ram­e­ters could be var­ied: ozone con­cen­tra­tion, tem­per­a­ture and water vapour con­cen­tra­tion. Ad­vanc­ing con­tact angle mea­sure­ments with var­i­ous liq­uids were used to mon­i­tor sur­face en­er­gy changes im­part­ed by the treat­ment. Dif­fer­ences of 30% in the sur­face en­er­gies be­tween the orig­i­nal non-coat­ed and the mod­i­fied poly­ofe­fine sur­face was de­tect­ed.

Thus sur­face mod­i­fi­ca­tion leads to im­prove­ments in the ad­he­sion of the coat­ings. The grip be­tween the coat­ings and the mod­i­fied sur­face is ex­ten­sive­ly high­er than that of the polyurethane-coat­ed floor­ings.

Ac­knowl­edge­ments

We would like to thank the Ar­beits­ge­mein­schaft In­dus­trieller Forschungsvere­ini­gun­gen “Otto von Gu­er­icke” e.V. (AiF) (As­so­ci­a­tion of In­dus­tri­al Re­search Or­gan­i­sa­tions) for the fi­nan­cial sup­port of the reasearch pro­ject (AiF 11753 N) fund­ed by the bud­get of the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs.

The re­search re­port is avail­able on re­quest from FRT.