What Is an Epoxy Floor Coating?
Many plants are making the investment in epoxy floor coating for their high traffic areas. This is an incredibly helpful tool – one that can be used on several different surfaces – and doesn’t require a lot of upkeep in order to prevent damage. It can almost be forgotten about once it’s installed, but can also be exactly what you need to reduce accidents on the site and prevent any number of major concerns.
What Is Epoxy?
Before getting into too much detail about the reason to get a high quality floor coating like ENECON NorCal’s ENECLAD FPS, it’s best to start with what an “epoxy” actually is.
An epoxy is the cured end of an epoxy resin, a type of material from a particular chemical group called, unsurprisingly, epoxide groups. The chemistry is not vital to understand this, other than to know that an epoxy happens when two reactive polymers and prepolymers from this group interact with one another and create the strong adhesive and sealant that we know as epoxy.
Because it is made up of polymers (large molecules), it is not very reactive once it’s been cured, meaning that it is highly resistant to chemicals and corrosives. Some epoxies form thermosetting polymers that are also highly resistant to heat, a particularly useful property in metalworks, coal power plants, and other places where heavy industry is the standard.
What Use Is an Epoxy Floor Coating?
There are a number of reasons why you would want to have an epoxy floor coating in your plant. Perhaps the most obvious is that its nonreactive nature makes it highly resistant to acids, alkalides, salt, and other substances that may break down a concrete floor over time and cause environmental problems or damage to the foundation of the plant.
Moreover, it is highly abrasion resistant for high traffic areas. If, for example, you have a loading dock, you can be sure that the floor will take a pretty consistent beating just from regular use. A high quality epoxy floor can reduce that damage significantly and extend the life of those floors by decades, requiring only a new coat rather than a new surface at the end of it.
Even more than that, though, it’s easy to add a textured element to the epoxy so that it creates a slip-resistant surface as well. This is good in places where the floor is likely to be wet, on ramps that are used to move heavy equipment, and even around sharp corners.
ENECON NorCal, an independent distributor for ENECON Corporation in Northern California, offers a full line of protective coatings and sealants for all types of industrial applications. There are a number of benefits to this incredible material, and smart factory owners and operators are finding new uses for epoxy floor coating every day.