Tex­tile floor­ings are used on a large scale. This ap­plies more and more also to the health and hy­giene sec­tor. The clean­ing of tex­tile floor­ings puts the clean­ing ser­vice com­pa­nies face with great chal­lenges. The ef­fi­cient and hy­gien­ic clean­ing of tex­tile floor­ings is only pos­si­ble in the con­text of a basic clean­ing. The most im­por­tant method, the spray ex­trac­tion, brings sev­er­al dis­ad­van­tages. These in­clude the high water entry, the re­sult­ing long dry­ing times and as­so­ci­at­ed down­time for the op­er­a­tor, but also the po­ten­tial dam­age to the tex­tile floor­ings.

In this re­search pro­ject car­bon diox­ide clathrates were used for the first time for clean­ing of tex­tile floor­ings. These car­bon diox­ide clathrates were made both in pure form and with em­bed­ded ethanol in a 10-liter pres­sure re­ac­tor of car­bon diox­ide and water and adding the ap­pro­pri­ate ad­di­tive at pres­sures be­tween 30 and 50 bar and tem­per­a­tures be­tween 0 ° C and 5 °C. For the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of car­bon diox­ide clathrates next TOC and den­si­ty mea­sure­ments were also car­ried out UV-VIS mea­sure­ments. A stor­age of the clathrates was pos­si­ble at tem­per­a­tures of -20 °C over sev­er­al days. The ap­pli­ca­tion of clathrates on the tex­tile floor­ings was car­ried out with the aid of a pres­sure jet sys­tem.

The de­vel­oped clathrate clean­ing method has com­pared to the spray ex­trac­tion method de­ci­sive ad­van­tages: With its sin­gle com­po­nents of water and car­bon diox­ide clathrates are en­vi­ron­men­tal­ly and tox­i­co­log­i­cal­ly safe. With­out harm­ing the tex­tile floor­ing, the clathrates can be ap­plied as a solid and also re­moved again. This al­lows the ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of the floor­ings due to the low resid­u­al mois­ture after a short time. The time pe­ri­ods dur­ing which the tex­tile floor­ings can­not be used will be re­duced by the clathrate method de­vel­oped to a min­i­mum. The clathrate method shows in the re­moval of dif­fer­ent stains from dif­fer­ent tex­tile floor­ings with the spray ex­trac­tion method com­pa­ra­ble re­sults.

The dis­in­fect­ing ef­fect of the clathrate in the pu­rifi­ca­tion pro­cess of mi­cro­bial stains is also com­pa­ra­ble to the spray ex­trac­tion method. Based on these re­sults and the high area per­for­mance and the low cost, the new method for clean­ing tex­tile floor­ings with car­bon diox­ide clathrates rep­re­sents an ad­van­ta­geous al­ter­na­tive to the con­ven­tion­al basic clean­ing pro­cess.

The research report is available on request from FRT.