Elastic floor coverings are treated with floorcare coatings in order to increase their service life and to maintain their optical appearance. Floorcare coatings provide protection against scratches, abrasion and walking imprints and improve cleaning properties.

Regarding commonplace floorcare coatings (basing on anionic polymers, for instance), several soil components can penetrate into elastic floorings, especially at long contact time, causing irreversible damage.

Examples of problematic soils are alcoholic disinfectants, ointments containing iodine as well as ingredients of drugs, cosmetics, perfumes and other beauty and wellness products.
Within the scope of the research project, complementary phase dispersions were therefore developed for single-stage application of care films with high resistance and barrier effect against soil components on elastic floor coverings.

Complementary phase dispersions are based on conventional care dispersions and contain encapsulated cationic polymers that have a very high crosslinking density. In the drying process, encapsulated cationic polymers are incorporated into the metal-crosslinked anionic network of the care film via amino groups present on the capsule surface, thus serving as a multifunctional crosslinking point.

Due to the high degree of crosslinking, care films made from complementary phase dispersions exhibit high mechanical and chemical stability as well as a high barrier effect against soil components. In addition to high degree of cross-linking, the high barrier effect is based on immobilisation of soil components in such care films: anionic soil components adsorb on cationic polymers and cationic soil components on anionic polymers via electrostatic interactions.

The research report is available on request from FRT.