Taking The Mystery Out Of Selecting ESD Flooring
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anticipates a doubling or tripling of that number over the next 10 to 20 years. Any flooring selection should consider slip resistance in wet and dry conditions and the floor must meet the coefficient of friction parameters of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). In addition to slip resistance, some companies require anti-skid surfaces for wet areas, incline ramps and locations where heavy loads are pushed or pulled.
Many of today’s manufacturing operations are actually large-scale test and burn-in facilities. Despite the obvious absence of loud assembly and automation equipment, these environments can become extremely noisy from the monotonous hum of cooling fans in both test equipment and the final product itself. Telecom manufactures like Lucent Technologies, Nortel Networks and Cisco have reduced noise problems by installing softer floors, such as carpet or rubber, that offer both sound absorption and anti-fatigue properties.
Another ergonomic consideration involves the unnecessary separation of manufacturing areas from so-called offices. Traditionally, the floors in offices were carpeted, while manufacturing areas were outfitted with tile or coatings. These flooring differentiators further segregated the hourly workers from salaried employees, diminishing teamwork and distorting or prolonging what should have been streamlined communication between departments. Hewlett Packard, Phillips Medical and many other companies have integrated engineering offices and SMT manufacturing by installing floors that adequately absorb sound, despite the rattle and hum of conveyors and automatic assembly equipment. Lucent Technologies in Mount Olive, New Jersey actually won an architectural award for creating a more egalitarian environment that placed accounting, engineering and management within the same workspace as assembly and final testing.
Maintenance Considerations
In choosing an ESD flooring material, it’s important to consider the relationship between long-term ESD performance and special maintenance considerations. Some floors require only periodic vacuuming or wet-mopping, while others, to even perform, require the installation of one to three coats of a special ESD floor finish. As any experienced plant manager knows, because of the sheer size of the area in question, maintenance and maintenance costs of a floor can quickly get out of hand, driving up the actual cost of ownership of a floor to far in excess of initial promises or expectations. For this reason, no decision regarding specific materials should ever be made without fully assessing its care and cleaning requirements.
If special floor finishes are required, the estimated cost of ownership should include the additional cost of the finish, the cost of verifying the performance of the finish, as well as the hidden costs associated with furniture moving and other activities that cause inevitable “downtime” during maintenance procedures. Certain resilient flooring manufacturers claim that, with only occasional high-speed buffing, their floors will shine and perform. While this may be true, it’s important to calculate the real cost, by assessing the lesser effectiveness of this “occasional” dry-buffing as compared, for example, with the monthly application of ESD finishes to vinyl or with the annual steam-cleaning of carpet tiles.
In considering maintenance requirements, the function of the facility, traffic patterns, the proximity of the floor to entrances, local climate and weather conditions, as well as subjective factors such as desired appearance and company image all should be taken into account. The spotless, shiny vinyl floor in a class-100 clean-room can be an eyesore and also a maintenance nightmare around a loading dock. Super-hard, robust epoxy coatings might address the punishment and rolling load considerations in “boxbuild” operations, but in a factory where layouts frequently change, the inherent dulling that chair casters cause will affect the appearance of the floor, deterring a buyer who cares about company image. The same ESD carpet tile that’s stained by spilled solder paste might, except around the screening process, be the ideal choice for every area in a 50,000 square foot facility. When time permits, it’s always a good idea to setup a beta installation or to visit another company with the same type of floor in use in a similar application. There is no substitute for due diligence. The pictures on flooring brochures all look beautiful, but remember that they’re almost always taken immediately after maintenance and certainly always before the floor has sustained any significant abuse.
Repairs And Replacement
One of the most frequently overlooked considerations during the process of evaluating floors concerns the ease and impact of repairs. No matter what kind of floor is installed, future repairs of one sort or another should always both be anticipated and expected. I’ve seen cases where movers and riggers have damaged brand new floors, even before the tenants had moved into their new facility.
As with maintenance issues, the best protection against costly and timeconsuming mistakes is to take into account the various scenarios within the facility where the floor will be used. To the extent possible, a savvy buyer should also consider all of the variables surrounding the use and abuse of the floor. Repairs that can be done easily in an open area, for instance, can be nearly impossible to perform in a crowded, three-shift factory.
Here is a sampling of issues, relating to maintenance and repair, that bear consideration when choosing among the various floors, whether static control or standard:
- If a vapor mitigation membrane was used in the original installation of a permanently bonded floor, the vapor membrane can be compromised during stripping and repair;
**This article originally appeared in the Dec. '02 issue of Conformity Magazine.
