Within the IGF project 18035 BG, a plasma-based dry de-coating process was developed as an alternative to wet-chemical basic cleaning of elastic floor coverings with the associated cleaning machine technology, in which the use of water and chemicals is dispensed with; furthermore, the personnel expenditure is reduced and drying times before re-filming are eliminated.

The new process was developed in combination with a maintenance coating modified by the addition of suitable additives (e.g. olefins, in particular polyethylene waxes, intumescent or heat conducting agents).

However, this modified maintenance film is not suitable for all resilient floor coverings and only for areas of low stress due to reduced adhesion and abrasion resistance compared to conventional maintenance films.

The aim of the research project was to develop a plasma-active care film based on intumescent crosslinkers with optimized adhesion and abrasion resistance for use in areas of high stress, which enables plasma-based dry de-coating.

For this purpose, a two-layer care coating was developed, consisting of a waxy release layer with included long-chain carboxylic acids and a layer containing an intumescent polymer network.

The intumescent polymer network was generated from a commercially available floorcare coating and a specially developed intumescent crosslinker.

For this purpose, amino groups were introduced on a commercially available intumescent agent by chemical surface functionalization, which serve as additional cross-linking centres within the network during film formation.

Together with the carboxylic acid-containing release layer, this improves both cohesion and adhesion compared to the previous project, leading to good chemical resistance, barrier effect against permeative soiling, abrasion resistance and slip resistance in addition to improved adhesion and film stability.

Overall, however, the development work on the intumescent effect showed that the functionalization developed for the crosslinker also significantly reduced the disintegration effect and thus the possibility of plasma-based dry de-coating.

The research report is available on request from FRT.