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De­vel­op­ment of lu­mi­nes­cent floor­care coat­ings with in­te­grat­ed func­tion­al­iza­tion for the rapid de­ter­mi­na­tion of the coat­ing qual­i­ty

IGF 17096 N

Poly­mer­ic floor­care coat­ings have a lim­it­ed lifes­pan, so that de­pend­ing on the de­gree of wear of the floor­ing a strip­ping and re­coat­ing with poly­mer dis­per­sions per­formed by the build­ing clean­ing com­pa­ny is in­evitable after a cer­tain time. These two pro­ce­dures are very la­bor-in­ten­sive and cost­ly and are per­formed by the build­ing clean­ing com­pa­nies based on their own ex­pe­ri­ence gen­er­al­ly long be­fore a com­plete wear of poly­mer­ic coat­ings has oc­curred.

Cur­rent­ly the point in time is cho­sen by the build­ing clean­ers by con­sid­er­ing the most worn down areas of the floor­ings, which often rep­re­sent a rel­a­tive­ly small share of the total area. A cur­rent trend shows that for such clean­ing ser­vices the pay­ment isn’t done ac­cord­ing to the ac­tu­al ef­fort re­quired, but as a fla­trate per area worked reg­u­lar­ly. There­fore from an eco­nom­ic point of view it is de­sir­able for the build­ing clean­ers to lower the fre­quen­cy of strip­ping and coat­ing pro­ce­dures.

In order to im­prove their ef­fi­cien­cy the clean­ing en­ter­pris­es need a rapid method for as­sess­ing the coat­ing qual­i­ty of elas­tic floor­ings. Such a method would re­veal the de­gree of wear of poly­mer­ic floor­care coat­ings and allow the wear to be quan­ti­fied. This would en­sure that strip­ping and coat­ing are not per­formed more fre­quent­ly than nec­es­sary, but in­stead until a crit­i­cal min­i­mum film thick­ness of the floor­care coat­ing is reached. How­ev­er, sim­ple and in­ex­pen­sive meth­ods for eval­u­at­ing the coat­ing qual­i­ty of elas­tic floor­ings are at the pre­sent time not avail­able.

As the re­sults show, an ap­proach to solve this prob­lem re­lies on the in­te­gra­tion of nanoscale lu­mi­nes­cent pig­ments to com­mon floor­care prod­ucts. The cho­sen pig­ments do not alter the ap­pear­ance of the mod­i­fied poly­mer coat­ing under nor­mal light­ing con­di­tions. When ex­posed to UV-A-light, how­ev­er, these pig­ments ex­hib­it a strong flu­o­res­cence in the vis­i­ble range.

From the lu­mi­nance of the emit­ted light the ac­tu­al de­gree of wear re­sult­ing in a re­duced film thick­ness after a cer­tain time of use can be de­ter­mined. By mea­sur­ing the cur­rent film thick­ness it may be de­cid­ed on a day by day basis when and to what ex­tent a new strip­ping and coat­ing pro­ce­dure is nec­es­sary.

The research report is available on request from FRT.

The IGF-pro­ject IGF 17096 N of the re­search as­so­ci­a­tion Europäische Forschungs­ge­mein­schaft Reini­gungs- und Hy­gien­etech­nolo­gie e.V., Cam­pus Ficht­en­hain 11, 47807 Krefeld, was sup­port­ed with­in the fund­ing pro­gram „In­dus­trielle Gemein­schafts­forschung und -en­twick­lung (IGF)“ by the Fed­er­al Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and Cli­mate Ac­tion due to a de­ci­sion of the Ger­man Par­lia­ment.