A high-build epoxy resin floor coating application
What is a High-build Resin coating?
A cheap and cheerful floor coating such as you might buy in a harware shop will usually be thinnned with solvents or water and will typically have a solids content of less than 40%. This enables the coating to be easily applied very thinly, often as thin as 40 microns (that’s less than a 20th of a millimetre!).
Inevitably, a coating as thin as that will have a limited life and not be very durable. You can’t however apply such coating thickly because the solvent/water content needs to evaporate or else the coating not cure properly and bubble.
A high-build coating is sometimes described as ‘solvent-free’, which technically means it would have a solids content of 100%. In practice, most high-build resin coatings have around 95% solids content; a small amount of solvent being needed to flow easily. Because of the high resin content plus the addition of some fillers, high-build coatings are two compontent, curing by chemical reaction.
A high-build resin coating can be thickly applied because the vast majority of the curing happens through chemical-reaction, with very little evaporation of liquids. In practice, a high-build resin coating is typcially applied at 250-300 microns per coats (upto 7-8 times the thickness of a standard cheap floor coating). This means not only is there a significant resin content able to give good performance in industrial conditions but there is suffficient thickness to incorporate aggregates that will make a real difference to slip and skid resistance.
A high-build floor coating is almost always applied by brush or roller because it contains fillers but being easy to apply, large areas can be quickly covered with the chemical-reaction normally ensuring a relatively fast cure (there are cold-cure grades available for winter application).
Those are the essential details; You can read more technical detail on the data sheet for our own High-build Epoxy coating here