The high per­cent­age of ac­ci­dents caused by slip­ping re­quires wa­ter-load­ed bare­foot areas ac­cord­ing to GUV-I 8527, a prop­er se­lec­tion of floor­ings, as well as of clean­ing meth­ods and agents, re­spec­tive­ly. The de­mand­ed slip re­sis­tance in such areas may be de­ter­mined only sta­tion­ary ac­cord­ing to DIN 51097 (ramp test). More­over, no mo­bile test meth­ods are known which cor­re­late with the stan­dards men­tioned. Be­cause of these rea­sons, the clean­ing and care meth­ods can­not be op­ti­mized under prac­ti­cal con­di­tions rel­e­vant for well­ness areas. With­in a re­search pro­ject per­formed by wfk – Clean­ing Tech­nol­o­gy In­sti­tute in Krefeld in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Prüf- und Forschungsin­sti­tut Pir­masens (PFI) could be shown that it is pos­si­ble in prin­ci­ple to in­crease the slip re­sis­tance with a two-lay­er-sys­tem, con­sist­ing of a cation­ic poly­mer dis­per­sion as ad­he­sive layer and an an­ion­ic dis­per­sion with in­ter­sper­sions on top of it. It is as­sumed that a fur­ther im­prove­ment dur­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the pro­ject re­sults by com­pa­nies is pos­si­ble by the op­ti­miza­tion of the par­ti­cle ge­om­e­try as well as the adap­tion of the poly­mer and par­ti­cle sys­tems. It has also been found that the tiles coat­ed with the new two-lay­er-sys­tem showed a bet­ter clean­ing be­hav­ior com­pared to the un­coat­ed tiles.

For the de­ter­mi­na­tion of the slip re­sis­tance of those ma­te­ri­als a mo­bile func­tion­al model of a step gen­er­a­tor (25 kg, ap­prox. 45 cm x 30 cm base area, foot with shoe size 24 and spe­cial ar­ti­fi­cial sole) was de­vel­oped and built. In the frame of the pro­ject a cor­re­la­tion has been es­tab­lished be­tween the mea­sure­ment val­ues ob­tained by using the mo­bile step gen­er­a­tor and those cor­re­spond­ing to the in­clined ramp (in ac­cor­dance to DIN 51097). In the ma­jor­i­ty of the cases there was found a de­vi­a­tion of the ac­cep­tance angle of around 2° for the test­ed tiles from the val­ues de­ter­mined with the in­clined ramp. This de­vi­a­tion cor­re­sponds to the typ­i­cal stan­dard de­vi­a­tions of the stan­dard method (in­clined ramp). The de­vel­oped method thus al­lows a de­ter­mi­na­tion of the on-site slip re­sis­tance of ce­ram­ic floor­ings.

The IGF-pro­ject 16556 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.