National Bureau of Standards Technical Note 783 Nat. Bur. Stand. (U.S.), Tech. Note 783, 68 pages (Aug. 1973) For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 20402 (Order by SD Catalog No. C13.46:783). Price $0.90 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page 4. Maintenace of Floors in Hospitals by Mortimer Russell..... ABSTRACT This report is addressed to the problem of selection and maintenance of flooring to the best advantage in terms of durability, type and severity of service, appearance, comfort, and safety. The selection of flooring is discussed with respect to service life, maintenance, obsolescence, and trade-off advantages. Two articles by maintenance administrators include information and discussion helpful in determining maintenance cost, trade-offs, and selection of flooring for different types of service. Field observations and preliminary field tests by the National Bureau of Standards indicate areas in which research is needed, as in laboratory tests for wear and slip resistance. Observations and field tests are impracticable to use for procurement. This report is helpful in the selection and maintnenace of flooring and floor finishes. More important, it points up areas in which research is needed to develop information for this purpose. KEY WORDS; Carpets; durability; economics; field studies; flooring; Materials and Composites Section; Structures, Materials, and Life Safety Division; Center for Building Technology; Institute for Applied Technology; National Bureau of Standards. Flooring may be defined as the wearing element of the floor assembly on which people walk and on which furniture is placed. It may be considered as a sub-element of the Floor-Ceiling Built Element [1]* and is usually not a structural component, although sometimes concrete constitutes the flooring or wearing element. Flooring may be classified into four basic types: hard, resilient, textile, and wood. Hard flooring may be defined as rigid flooring which is not readily indented or scratched, at least not to an appreciable depth or width. This includes various types of ceramic tile, such as mosaic, quarry, and paver tile; concrete, with or without coating or surfacing; monolithic surfacings; terrazzo; brick; and natural stone. Monolithic surfacing is a composition applied to a floor to provide an improved wearing surface. Terrazzo is flooring made by embedding decorative stone in a matrix (of concrete or synthetic resin) and then polishing (grinding) smooth. Resilient flooring is semi-rigid or plastic and is therefore subject to a certain amount of scratching and indenting but is usually designed to recover from indentation and to have a limited defined scratch resistance. Resilient flooring or floor covering includes such products as asphalt tile, vinyl asbestos tile, rubber tile, vinyl tile, sheet vinyl floor coverings, linoleum, and bituminous based sheet floor covering Textile floor covering is that made from fibers, filaments, or yarns and is usually referred to as carpets and rugs. Most textile floor coverings have a woven or tufted loop or cut pile but some are nonwoven, *Numbers in brackets indicate references at the end of this report. flat, felt-like products made by the needlepunch process. other types, such as knitted or braided rugs. There are also Wood flooring is most commonly tongue and grooved strip oak or pine but may be of other species. Plank, parquet, and block flooring are also used. The first article in this report, "Factors in Selection of Flooring" is a discussion of how life-cost, annual-cost, and trade-offs may be applied to the selection of flooring. Following are two articles on selection and maintenance of flooring in government buildings. These articles provide some detail on the maintenance factor of life-cost, background on problems under various service conditions, and information on the selection of flooring for different types of service. Selection of flooring is sometimes dictated by the type and severity of service but should also be based on a trade-off between desirable features and life-cost or annual-cost. Observations on the performance of flooring follow an earlier study, published in 1968, which was based mostly on military installations. Types of flooring studied include monolithic surfacings, resilient floor coverings, carpet, and wood flooring. Also reported are field experiments by the National Bureau of Standards, Center for Building Technology. Flooring and floor finishes were applied under conditions known and controlled as far as possible. The performance of these products was observed and recorded. 2. Factors in Selection of Flooring by Winthrop C. Wolfe Materials and Composites Section; Structures, Materials and Life Safety Division; Center for Building Technology; Institute for Applied Technology; National Bureau of Standards Economic decision making has been applied to a variety of activities, including purchase of machinery and equipment, stock transactions, design and construction of buildings and dams, mining operations, water supply, and sewage disposal. This decision making can be based on annual-cost comparisons [2]. This type of analysis can be applied to interior |