Cleaning and maintenance of elastic flooring represents an important market segment regarding cleaning service companies. To increase lifetime and maintain optical properties, elastic floorings are treated with floorcare coatings providing protection against scratches, abrasion and walking imprints together with improved cleaning properties.

Basic cleaning and recoating is usually performed well before impairment of protective functions of applied floorcare coatings in order to reliably avoid irreversible damage of elastic floorings. Renewal of floorcare coating is connected to high personnel effort and time.

A new method for monitoring of coating quality based on generation and detection of acoustic signals was therefore developed in the research project. Acoustic probes which, when excited with periodically modulated monochromatic light, convert absorbed energy into heat and release it into their environment, were included in floorcare coatings.

Periodic excitation of acoustic probes leads to periodic temperature changes and thus to nanoscopic periodic expansion and contraction of floor coatings. This results in the formation of acoustic waves which can be detected with a commercially available microphone.

Intensity of acoustic signal depends linearly on layer thickness of modified floorcare coatings. Furthermore, a local change of layer thickness (defects in floorcare coating) can be identified.

The new method for monitoring of coating quality allows need oriented renewal of floorcare coatings and therefore an economical treatment of elastic floorings.

The research report is available on request from FRT.