Ensuring that floorcoverings are fit for purpose is important to suppliers and specifiers alike.
Manufacturers as well as others in the supply chain need to be able to test the durability of floorcoverings, since premature wear can prove costly in terms of complaints, product recalls and damage to reputation.
SATRA realises that durability is a vital issue and has developed a method for testing different floorcoverings to help determine how they will wear and how well they retain their appearance. This test involves the interaction between a moving shoe and flooring, based on SATRA’s comprehensive gait research.
The SATRA STM 528 Pedatron provides an accelerated wear simulation under realistic conditions and can be used as an effective means of assessing the wear characteristics of floorcoverings.
It is applicable to many flooring surfaces and also flooring hardware such as stair nosings.
The flooring is subjected to a cyclic walking action from a standard shoe, where the sample rotates incrementally while the forepart of the shoe is in contact with the floor. These individual footsteps are designed to replicate a mixture of walking in a straight line and turning a corner. The floorcovering under test rotates such that it completes
a full 360deg rotation every 150 footfalls.
The flooring is visually assessed and a subjective assessment of wear and appearance retention made.
For stair nosings, the flooring remains stationary during the test, with the footfall positioned to ensure that the centre forepart of the shoe strikes the nosing edge, representing walking down or up the stairs. The floorcovering is visually checked for any movement of the nosing insert and also to ensure if any damage or cracking has occurred.
As well as checking the floor for wear, SATRA can use the STM 528 Pedatron to replicate wear on floorcoverings in order to assess slip resistance of worn products, and it can simulate wear in relatively short periods of time. As a result, it is able to give manufacturers and suppliers an indication of the long-term effects of wear on the slip resistance of their floors. This is undertaken in conjunction with the pendulum test EN 16165:2021 Annex C, with a test preformed on a specific area of the flooring after various numbers of footfalls: normally every 250,000.
Use of the STM 528 Pedatron is valuable, whether to assess an existing product or a product under development before being released onto the market.
