Ac­cord­ing to in­for­ma­tion of the Ger­man Ac­ci­dent Pre­ven­tion & In­sur­ance As­so­ci­a­tion more than 255.000 work ac­ci­dents are caused by stum­bling, slip­ping or falling. The re­sult­ing costs are about 330 mil­lion €/a. In order to avoid these ac­ci­dents var­i­ous in­for­ma­tions re­spec­tive­ly rules were pub­lished by the pro­fes­sion­al as­so­ci­a­tion. One of the most im­por­tant pub­li­ca­tions is the lat­est edi­tion of BGR 181 “Floors in work­ing rooms and work­ing areas with slip dan­ger” (Oc­to­ber 2003). This stan­dard obli­ga­to­ry fixes dif­fer­ent kinds of slip­ping class­es for floors in dif­fer­ent areas with var­i­ous slip­ping risks as well as a test­ing pro­ce­dure for de­ter­mi­na­tion of slip re­sis­tance. But the test­ing pro­ce­dure (DIN 51130) is a sta­tion­ary test method, where test pan­els walk on an in­clined plane and de­ter­mine the slip re­sis­tance of the floor to be test­ed (ramp test).

In the past, the lack of a mo­bile test­ing pro­ce­dure which cor­re­lates to the test­ing pro­ce­dure ac­cord­ing to DIN 51130 ex­ist­ed. There­fore the main­te­nance clean­ing en­ter­pris­es had no pos­si­bil­i­ty to mea­sure and doc­u­ment clean­ing and care qual­i­ty on the spot im­me­di­ate­ly after fin­ish­ing the clean­ing. There­fore it was tar­get of the pro­ject to de­vel­op a mo­bile step sim­u­la­tor with re­spect to BGR 191.

For eval­u­a­tion of slip re­sis­tance floor­ings which rep­re­sent prac­tise and show dif­fer­ent slip re­sis­tance class­es were se­lect­ed: elas­tic floor­ings, lam­i­nate, unglazed tiles (with/with­out dis­place­ment space) and gran­ite (sur­face C 120 grind­ing).

They were char­ac­terised con­cern­ing slip re­sis­tance with re­spect to soil­ings water (incl. de­ter­gent acc. to DIN 51131), sand, oil (acc. to DIN 51130) and dust. The slip re­sis­tance mea­sure­ments are car­ried out by a de­vel­oped and built mo­bile step sim­u­la­tor. Based on this method op­ti­mum clean­ing and care pro­cess­es were de­fined. Fi­nal­ly a func­tion­al ma­trix for the se­lec­tion of suit­able clean­ing and care pro­cess­es – de­pend­ing on the slip re­sis­tance class – was elab­o­rat­ed.

We thank the Ar­beits­ge­mein­schaft in­dus­trieller Forschungvere­ini­gun­gen e.V. (AiF) (As­so­ci­a­tion of In­dus­tri­al Re­search Or­gan­i­sa­tions) for fund­ing the pro­ject AiF 14619 N through a fi­nan­cial sup­port by the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs.

The re­search re­port is avail­able on re­quest from FRT.