In dif­fer­ent sen­si­tive work­ing areas (like elec­tron­ic in­dus­try, data pro­cess­ing or in med­i­cal in­stru­ments) elec­tro­stat­ic dis­charg­ing has to be avoid­ed be­cause of its neg­a­tive ef­fects. In order to pre­vent elec­tro­stat­ic charg­ing, elas­tic floor­ings with par­tic­u­lar re­quire­ments con­cern­ing the elec­tri­cal be­haviour are usu­al­ly being ap­plied. To pre­serve their func­tion­al char­ac­ter­is­tics over a long time, these spe­cial floor­ings have to be cleaned reg­u­lar­ly. The re­quired clean­ing ef­fort is here sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than that for con­ven­tion­al floor­ings. The com­mon clean­ing and floor care prod­ucts, which should min­i­mize the clean­ing ef­fort and the wear prop­er­ties, can­not be used in the case of elec­tri­cal­ly con­duc­tive floor­ings, be­cause of their iso­lat­ing ef­fects. One ap­proach con­sists in the ap­pli­ca­tion of tem­po­rary coat­ings based on con­duc­tive ad­di­tives, like poly­mers and pig­ments. In con­trast to com­mon an­ti­stat­i­ca, their ef­fi­cien­cy doesn’t de­pend on the sur­round­ing hu­mid­i­ty. Aim of the pro­ject there­fore was the de­vel­op­ment of ap­pli­ca­ble new care pro­cess­es for con­duc­tive floor­ings. For this rea­son in­ves­ti­ga­tions were car­ried out on the in­tro­duc­tion of elec­tri­cal­ly con­duc­tive poly­mers, re­spec­tive­ly pig­ments in com­mon floor care prod­ucts. Dif­fer­ent for­mu­la­tions were test­ed. Of prac­ti­cal rel­e­vance are long-term sta­ble disper­sions, in which when nec­es­sary the sed­i­ment­ed ad­di­tives may be re­dis­persed read­i­ly by shak­ing. The so mod­i­fied floor care dis­per­sions were ap­plied by var­i­ous pro­ce­dures on rep­re­sen­ta­tive elec­tri­cal­ly con­duc­tive floor­ings, like PVC, linoleum and rub­ber. Af­ter­wards they were char­ac­terised and op­ti­mised with re­gard to sur­face/con­tact re­sis­tance, elec­tro­stat­ic pro­tec­tion of footwear and floor­ing in com­bi­na­tion with a per­son, bright­ness (trans­paren­cy) and rough­ness. The coat­ed floor­ings were charac­terised in terms of the men­tioned pa­ram­e­ters after ad­di­tion­al soil­ing with prac­ti­cal rel­e­vant soils and ar­ti­fi­cial weathe­ring, re­spec­tive­ly.

The IGF-pro­ject 15272 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.