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Concrete Floors, Slip Resistant Floors
It's important to consider safety when installing decorative concrete floors. Broom finishes and stamped floors offer good slip resistance, as do polished concrete floors. Additives such as sand or “Shark-Grip” can be added to make floors safer.
by Susan Brimo-Cox
So reports the National Floor Safety Institute. Still, while most contractors are aware of the problem, they find the subject confusing. And that's really not surprising, especially as it regards decorative concrete.
Part of the problem has to do with standards for slip resistance: Who has guidelines and which ones do you use to create anti-slip decorative concrete? Then there is the testing aspect: Which testing methods are appropriate and reliable, and in what testing conditions?
Slips occur when there is too little friction between the bottom of a person’s foot and the surface of the floor. The amount of direct contact is very important.
The most common measure of the relative slipperiness of a floor is its slip resistance, or coefficient of friction. This scale ranges from zero to one, in increments of tenths of a point, with zero representing the least amount of slip resistance.
According to Dianne Carey, a chemist with W.R. Meadows, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s recommendation is that walking surfaces have a minimum Static Coefficient of Friction of 0.5. But there are more stringent standards, she says. The Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines recommend 0.6 for level surfaces and 0.8 for ramps. “The higher the number, the more ‘friction’ is present,” Carey explains.
ASTM has several standards for slip resistance. Chris Sullivan, regional sales manager for QC Construction Products, says the age-old ASTM standard for testing slip resistance of floor sealers, coatings and polishes has been ASTM D2047. But this standard has limitations, he says, because it only tests smooth, dry surfaces in laboratory conditions. “No one slips and falls because a sealed surface was dry, which means this standard has very little correlation to real-world situations.”
In recent years, two ‘real world’ tests have slowly started to gain favor, ASTM 1679 and ASTM 1677. Both test most any surface, in the field, and both in dry or wet conditions. The difference between the two standards, Sullivan adds, is the type of machine used to perform the test.
Mike Anderson with Artscape Las Vegas also sees problems with ASTM D2047. “While this method is extremely accurate and is commonly referred to in flooring circles,” he says, “it can only be used dry in a controlled laboratory environment and cannot be used in the field on existing surfaces.”
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