Slip-resistance improvement on paints employed on walking surfaces by the incorporation of nanoparticles
2020
Author
Blanco M.
Abstract
Slips are one of the main causes of accidents with personal injuries, during working or leisure time. Poor slip resistance may be a result of the properties of the floor surface. The general trend show that slip resistance performance improves with the surface roughness of the floor. However, too high surface roughness can impede safe and comfortable mobility, and floor maintenance is more difficult and costly. An anti-slip paint with nanoparticles can increase the roughness of a surface without generating macroroughness, thus avoiding these problems. In this work, 3 different types of nanoparticles have been added to a solvent-borne and a water-borne epoxy paint formulation in order to develop slip-resistance paints for walking surfaces. The obtained results indicated that nanoparticle-based paints present a great potential for reducing the floor surface slipperiness. In some cases, the slip resistance values drastically increased in wet conditions of a surface, from PTV (Pendulum test value) < 10 to PTV > 35, reducing the falling risk probability that a pedestrian would experience when walking in a wet surface from 1 in 2 (PTV lower than 10) to 1 in 1,000,000 (PTV higher than 35). Moreover, this increase in PTV was achieved maintaining a roughness value lower than 3–5 microns, thus facilitating the cleaning and maintenance processes with respect to other conventional solutions. In this study, different parameters of the nanoparticles and the developed paints, which could affect the final properties of floor paints, are explored. This paper provides new insight in the relationship of the nanoparticle type and content with slipperiness and final surface appearance of the floor paint, as practical information for the formulation of slip resistance floor paint based on nanoparticles. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.
DOI
10.1016/j.porgcoat.2020.105852
Journal
Progress in Organic Coatings
Source
Scopus