Cleaning and maintenance of elastic flooring represents an important market segment regarding cleaning service companies.

To raise the 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 flooring.

Renewal of floorcare coating is connected to high personnel effort and time.

The aim of the research project was to develop magnetosensitive floorcare coatings (coatings with included magnetic probes) and a method for the automated, process-integrated determination of the coating quality (layer thickness and structural homogeneity) of resilient floor coverings provided with such coatings.

To determine the coating quality, the magnetic probes inserted into the magnetosensitive floorcare coatings are aligned by an external magnetic field and the resulting magnetic field strength is detected using a magnetometer.

The signal strength depends on the number of aligned probes, which correlates directly with the film thickness at the measuring point.

A functional model for the spatially resolved measurement of magnetic fields was developed as part of the project.

With the developed functional model, defects (caused by mechanical or chemical erosion) in the coating with a size of at least 2.5 mm can be detected automatically, i.e. a spatially resolved measurement of the coating quality is possible.

Based on the project results, a concept for the mechanical implementation of a measuring and evaluation unit for determining the coating quality of resilient floor coverings was developed in cooperation with the project advisory board, taking into account both the integration in the development of new machines and the retrofitting of existing machinery, so that a rapid transfer into practice is possible.

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.