In the last years cer­tain elas­tic floor­ings (e. g. PVC and Linoleum) part­ly were pro­vid­ed dur­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing with ad­di­tion­al sur­face coat­ings based most­ly on polyurethane (PUR) in order to im­prove soil­ing-, clean­ing- and wear prop­er­ties. How­ev­er, some prob­lems oc­cured in prac­tice. Nu­mer­ous cus­tomers com­plained for ex­am­ple about the low abra­sion re­sis­tance of those coat­ings. The clean­ing ser­vice en­ter­pris­es could not im­prove this sit­u­a­tion as poly­mer­ic care coat­ings did not ad­here ef­fec­tive­ly to those PUR-coat­ed floor­ings. The clean­ing ser­vice en­ter­pris­es were thus not able to offer an op­ti­mized main­te­nance for PUR-coat­ed floor­ings al­though those floor­ings rep­re­sent an im­por­tant mar­ket po­ten­tial. There­fore there was de­mand for new clean­ing and care meth­ods. These meth­ods should im­prove the clean­ing prop­er­ties of elas­tic floor­ings with­in the reg­u­lar clean­ing pro­ce­dure by fa­cil­i­tat­ing the ap­pli­ca­tion of tem­po­rary coat­ings. The so­lu­tion in­ves­ti­gat­ed with­in the re­search pro­ject was the func­tion­al­iza­tion of elas­tic floor­ings by means of low tem­per­a­ture at­mo­spher­ic plas­ma. The plas­ma treat­ment (ap­plied after strip­ping) caused an in­crease of the sur­face en­er­gy and of the ad­he­sion of poly­mer­ic care coat­ings.

The IGF-pro­ject 16259 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.