The hottest new flooring option is polyurethane resin. As modern decorating styles enjoy extended popularity and people strive to simplify their lives, a polyurethane resin floor makes sense for a functional floor in a contemporary setting.

Industrial Uses

Just as granite countertops and stainless steel appliances crossed over from industrial uses into the modern home kitchen, polyurethane resin flooring is crossing over from industrial applications to home use. Traditionally, polyurethane resin floors have been limited to locations like government buildings, restaurant and hotel kitchens, hospitals, clinics, and other high-traffic rooms.

Homeowners who want to simplify their lives are realizing that industrial grade surfaces have a place in the home. The characteristics of polyurethane resin flooring are a bulletproof resistance to scratches, shock-proof, and acid proof, so it resists staining.

A coating of resin can transform a bacteria-laden porous floor into a smooth, solid, sanitary surface. Resin is also a popular surface coating for unsealed concrete floors. Moreover, it is a forgiving surface, supple and comfortable on the feet. It can be used indoors or outdoors.

Colors

Polyurethane resin comes in a variety of bright, vivid colors, like grey, bone, black, blue, and green. Resin holds its color in indoor and outdoor uses. The pigmentation is bright and uniform. Polyurethane resin floors glow with a brilliance that no other floor surface provides. High gloss finishes reflect available light, making all your rooms seem brighter.

Application

Polyurethane resin is applied with a roller or a notched spatula. It is a self-leveling compound, so you can pour it on right over cracked or porous surfaces without leveling beforehand. Drying time is hardness after three to four days for contact, seven to ten days for chemical exposure.

Allergies And Asthma

The epoxy in the resin helps prevent dust penetration in the floor. Resin is easy to clean, easy to maintain, and easy on the feet. Household members who have allergies or asthma may notice significant improvement with a polyurethane resin floor, especially if the floor takes the place of carpeting or old hardwood floors.

Antimicrobial agents can be incorporated into the resin floor coating to create an antibacterial surface, particularly important in food preparation environments. Your floor will actually reduce the number of bacterial cells that come in contact with the surface of the floor.

Polyurethane resin flooring is bright, clean, colorful, and comfortable. When you are considering replacement flooring for your home, consider a resin floor coating and bring your home into the 21^st century.

So, you are starting a business and want to stay as green as possible in all aspects of your business. A great way to start is by choosing bamboo as the flooring material to be used in your new warehouse.

One of the hardest wood flooring materials you can choose for your industrial plant is bamboo. The toughness of bamboo is one of the reasons its use has grown in industrial flooring applications. Bamboo has some very rigid temperatures that it is subjected to. It can be very hot or cold, depending on the part of the world it is growing in. Not only is it very durable, it is also friendly to the environment.

Bamboo is actually a grass that can grow as tall as 140 feet and is considered to be the fastest growing plant in the world. Although bamboo grows in either extreme hot or cold climates, it takes a lot of abuse to damage it. That is another reason its use in industrial flooring is growing at such a rapid rate.

While it takes 50 years to grow a tree that is suitable for use in industrial flooring, it only takes five years for bamboo to achieve readiness for harvest.

Bamboo Industrial Flooring - Carbonizing

Bamboo flooring is available in its natural light blonde color or in a darker caramel color. The smoking process used to darken it from its natural color is called carbonizing. The longer the process takes, the darker the bamboo industrial flooring will turn out. Carbonizing is a pressure heating process that darkens the bamboo by pressure heating the fiber, thus allowing the sugar contents in the fiber to attain a coffee-colored tone.

Both light and dark colors are equally popular choices for bamboo industrial flooring. If you don’t have many windows or skylights in your warehouse, you might want to consider the natural blonde color. If there is plenty of light available, you might choose a dark color, which will help to hide signs of wear.

Bamboo Industrial Flooring – Environmentally Friendly

The “green choice experts” all rave about using bamboo for industrial flooring because it is a quickly renewable crop that is not damaging to the environment. Contributing to the popularity of bamboo floors is the fact that it is resistant to moisture, unlike hardwood floors, and thus less likely to expand or contract. Also, unlike laminate flooring, bamboo flooring does not have to be artificially colored or dyed, so the product is completely natural and has very low formaldehyde emissions.

Bamboo Industrial Flooring – Other Benefits

A bamboo floor is very easy to clean and is ideal for allergy sufferers because they do not promote dust or harbor dust mites. The other big advantage of bamboo over hardwood is cost. A bamboo floor will cost only 25% of what a hardwood floor costs.

Another big advantage of a bamboo industrial floor is that it can be installed over numerous types of sub-floors such as wood, sheathing grade plywood, vinyl tile, and strand board

In chemistry, epoxy is a thermosetting epoxide polymer that cures (polymerizes and crosslinks) when mixed with a catalyzing agent or hardener. Most common epoxy resins are produced from a reaction between epichlorohydrin and bisphenol-A.

Currently the epoxy industry amounts to more than 7 billion dollars within North America and 20 billion world-wide.

Epoxies are known for their excellent adhesion, chemical and heat resistant characteristics, their good to excellent mechanical properties, and their very good electrical insulating properties.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Health Risk

The primary health risk associated with epoxy use is sensitization to the hardener, which over time can induce an allergic reaction. Long term exposure to epoxy may cause oestrogenic activity, alteration of male reproductive organs, early puberty induction, shortened duration of breast feeding, and pancreatic cancer. The people that are most at risk are those that install epoxy floors on a daily basis, not the people that stand and walk on them every day.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Chemical Processing

Chemical processing facilities require a floor that can be easily kept very clean, and one that will not absorb chemicals if spilt on it. Other applications where epoxy floors make a lot of sense are, drum storage areas, laboratories, bulk storage areas, and splash/spill zones.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Education

Because of all the abuse a floor in a typical school takes, it is very common to find epoxy floors in classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, kitchens, locker rooms, entryways, laboratories, nurses’ offices, media centers, mechanical rooms, and restrooms.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Electronics

In electronic manufacturing facilities, assembly areas, inspection labs, fabrication areas, scrubber bays, waffle slabs, air plenums, plating lines, and clean rooms all have epoxy floors.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Food And Beverage

Applications inside the food and beverage industry for epoxy floors include: bottling lines, mixing areas, bakeries, dairies, meat packing areas, packaging lines, coolers, splashy/spill zones, and rendering plants.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Manufacturing

Manufacturing applications that commonly use epoxy floors include: assembly lines, traffic aisles, loading docks, machine shops, control rooms, battery rooms, chemical storage areas, locker/shower rooms and in-plant cafeterias.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Pharmaceutical

The extreme requirement for cleanliness inside corridors, processing areas, wash down areas, research labs, clean rooms, sterile areas, chemical storage areas, and shower rooms, make it mandatory that epoxy floors be required.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Public Spaces

Epoxy floors are ideal for public spaces because they can be cleaned very quickly and look great over many years of traffic. Museums, airports, hospitals, stadiums, fitness centers, rehab facilities, and welcome centers, all use epoxy floors.

Epoxy Flooring Products – Retail Environments

Supermarkets, restaurants, cafeterias, shopping malls, auto dealerships, museums, lobbies, and concourses use epoxy floors.

Epoxy Flooring Products - Transportation

Within this industry, traffic aisles, paint spray areas, plant lines, plating lines and filling station all use epoxy floors.

Thinking about putting an epoxy floor in your garage, then making sure you have all the proper tools in your epoxy flooring kit before you start the project will save you a lot of time and headaches.

Epoxy Flooring Kit – Analyze Your Garage Floor

Before you buy the materials to epoxy your garage floor, you should test it to determine if moisture is coming up through the concrete from the ground below. Just tape a plastic bag to your garage floor, wait 24 hours, then lift it up and check. If moisture is evident, your garage floor is not suitable for epoxy.

If you are dealing with a new slab, you must wait a minimum of 28 days, preferably two months, for the floor to cure and dry thoroughly before applying the epoxy coating. If you are dealing with a previously painted floor, the best advice is to remove the paint, especially when you are applying a solvent-based epoxy that could soften any that remains.

On the day you select to epoxy your garage floor, the temperature of the concrete must be 55 degrees, and the air temperature between 60 and 90 degrees.

Epoxy Flooring Kit – Preparation

Epoxy is a tough, long-lasting coating that you paint onto the concrete. It resists grease, oil, and many other substances that would ruin ordinary paint. It cleans easily and can be found in a variety of colors.

The reality is that not all concrete floors will hold a coating without a thorough cleaning beforehand that can be labor intensive and tedious. Plan to spend the first day removing oil spots, cleaning and de-greasing the floors, etching it with a mild acid, and scrubbing and rinsing a lot. The next day can be used for filling cracks and applying the first coat of epoxy.

Epoxy Flooring Kit – Measuring Device

Epoxy flooring kits contain some type of measuring device to allow you to measure the thickness of the epoxy between your finished surface and the floor. The thickness of the epoxy that you apply will directly affect the amount of tire heat the coating can absorb. Thin coatings will get discolored, blistered, and dulled much quicker than thick coatings over time. Just like any wear material, the thicker the material the longer it will last

Epoxy Flooring Kit – Etching Tools

If you don’t etch the floors as a preliminary step, then you will not be removing all of the dirt and residues that have been ground into your concrete. You will also not be opening up the pores of your concrete. Both of these factors will prevent the epoxy from adhering to your concrete properly and the epoxy you put on your floor will peel up in a very short period of time.

The term “epoxy flooring” is very difficult to define, but in general it is where multiple epoxy layers are placed on a floor surface regardless of the kind of epoxy resins applied, provided that the total thickness of all layers applied is at least 2 mm. Any epoxy floor consisting of less than three layers and less than 2 mm thick is called an “epoxy floor coating” and not epoxy flooring.

Epoxy Flooring – What Is Epoxy?

Epoxies are polymer materials that begin as liquids and are converted to the solid polymers by a chemical reaction. An epoxy based polymer is mechanically strong, chemically resistant to degradation of the chemical elements in the solid form and highly adhesive during conversion from liquid to solid.

Physically epoxy systems contain two components: resins and a hardener. The resin component is usually light, sometimes almost clear color, that emits almost no odor. Hardeners on the other hand are usually dark and have an ammonia like smell. When these two components are brought together and mixed intimately in a prescribed way, they will react chemically and link together irreversibly, and after the chemical reaction has been completed, they will form a rigid plastic material.

Epoxy Flooring – Industrial Epoxy Floor

In many cases it is extremely difficult to distinguish between an “epoxy floor” and an “industrial epoxy floor.” The type of industrial floor will depend, in most cases, on standards prescribed by different countries concerning the concrete base qualities, as well as on the characteristics of the floor to be installed, for the needs of a specific industry.

A simple definition of an industrial epoxy floor is one that has three layers of epoxy resins that are at least 2 mm thick, and at least two layers are 100% solid epoxy.

Epoxy Flooring – Resins

Epoxy resins are often modified using other products to improve some measured property of the final product such as toughness.

Epoxy flooring – Hardeners

Epoxy hardeners are not catalysts and they react with the epoxy resins, greatly contributing to the ultimate properties of the cured epoxy resin system. Epoxy hardeners provide: gel time, mixed viscosity, and de-mold time of the epoxy resin system. Physical properties of the epoxy resin system such as tensility, compression, and flexural properties are also influenced by epoxy hardeners.

The performance of epoxy hardeners in the epoxy resins system depend on the chemical characteristics of the epoxy resins and the physical characteristics while applying the epoxy resins system. The chemical characteristics of the epoxy resins that influence epoxy hardeners are: viscosity, amount and kind of diluents, and filers in epoxy resins. The physical characteristics of the epoxy resins system influencing the behavior of epoxy hardeners in the epoxy resins system are temperature of the work area, temperature of the resins system and moisture and dampness.