Facilities Managers Flooring Clinic
What Rapid Cure Flooring Solutions are Available to Me?
For over 30 years resin technology such as epoxies and polyurethanes have been used to provide seamless, hard wearing and chemical protection for floors in the industrial sector.
Although they continue to provide a perfectly function finish they can be slow to install impacting on where they are used. Often this can lead to clients and end users doing without the floor finish they need, or with suppliers and contractors attempting to speed up the curing process only to impact on the long term performance of the floor finish.Flowcrete Australia has a solution to this problem.
Flowfast is based on rapid curing acrylic resins typically providing cure times of 90 minutes. In the world of resin flooring, this is Bolt like quick. Nearly all epoxy coatings take between 6 and 10 hours to become touch dry. However this does not mean you can fully traffic them. 12 – 24 hours is the normal recommended time for light foot traffic and 36 – 48 hours for full vehicular traffic. So although it may be possible to install the floor within a tight time frame, such as a weekend, the curing times before it can be fully trafficked are often the downfall.
Flowcrete’s Flowfast can often provide the solution to all these issues. Within 90 minutes of the final coat being applied the floor achieves 100% cure. This means it can be fully trafficked including heavy fork lift traffic. It has full chemical cure (epoxies and most polyurethane take up to 7 days to cure) and it can be exposed to water and other fluids immediately. Epoxies are prone to ‘blooming’ if in contact with water within 24 hours of curing.
In recent years hybrid polyurethane systems have been introduced into the market which do provide quick curing and traffic times, however the product range is often very small limiting the market to specialist applications only. Flowfast is equally at home in industrial applications such as a food manufacturing facility as it is in commercial environments such as a supermarket environment of office lobby.
