At Spectra Contract Flooring, we’ve completed some of the most complex, heavy-duty industrial flooring projects for producers, distributors and others nationwide. We have the expertise, resources, and experience to plan and execute your industrial flooring project.

Critical demands of industrial flooring

Industrial flooring faces many demands — ultra heavy point loads, forklift traffic, chemical exposure and intense up-time demands to name just a few. Whether your facility must support heavy manufacturing, specialty food and beverage production, large-scale distribution or other applications, your floor is one of the most crucial parts of your operation. The right concrete flooring and finish can provide a range of key attributes, including:

• The ability to withstand ultra-heavy applications
• Resistance to puncturing from heavy machinery
• Static control for critical applications
• Extreme chemical and pH resistance
• Antimicrobial qualities
• Ease of cleaning and maintenance for strong lifecycle value

Industrial flooring solutions

To help you get the most out of your flooring investment, we’ll guide you toward the flooring system with the right price and performance for your heavy-duty industrial application. And our experienced team will ensure your flooring system is installed correctly, serving your facility for years to come.

Here are a couple flooring systems industrial facility managers should consider:

Concrete polishing

Through concrete polishing, we harden and strengthen your concrete surface, increasing resistance to contaminants, discoloration and heavy use. The process increases your surface’s light reflectivity, aesthetics and overall quality while improving its flatness and levelness. It requires no curing schedule, minimizing facility downtime for flooring work, and the finished surface is flat and level.

Polished concrete lasts for many years, and unlike epoxy and other coatings, it doesn’t flake and peel, eliminating the need to reapply coats of finishes each year and saving you money over time. It also reduces static electricity and accommodates a wide variety of flooring designs. These benefits make polished concrete a great fit for a variety of industrial applications from manufacturing to distribution and beyond.

Resinous flooring

Another great solution, resinous flooring uses floor coatings to create a long-lasting, aesthetically pleasing, cost-effective concrete surface.

As a category, resin flooring refers to floor coating systems installed over concrete that provide a hard, plastic-like surface well-suited to the demands of industrial facilities. There’s no one-size-fits-all resin flooring system that works in every application. Instead, there are many generic and proprietary systems to choose from, tailored to the needs of different facilities from airplane hangars to commercial kitchens and public transportation hubs.

The different generic systems —epoxies, methyl methacrylates, polyaspartics and urethane concretes being the most common— have different performance benefits, ranging from UV resistance and chemical resistance to fast cure times and low maintenance.

Here, we’ll give a brief description of each of these common resin flooring systems, offering insight into best-fit applications for each.

• Epoxy flooring systems

  Epoxy flooring systems are perhaps the best-known of these four generic resin types. Depending on the formulation, epoxies can exhibit a host of benefits from chemical resistance to good thickness builds for abrasion resistance and low VOC levels.

  Although they perform well in even the most heavy-duty industrial environments —withstanding scratching, forklift traffic and more— epoxy systems will yellow over time if exposed to UV. Notably, some epoxy systems are effective at controlling static, important for some controlled applications such as electronics manufacturing facilities.

  Epoxy flooring systems tend to be cheaper than other resinous flooring types, but installation can take much longer with dry times as long as 24 hours depending on the product you choose.

• Methyl methacrylates (MMA) flooring systems

  Methyl methacrylates cure faster and can be installed at lower temperatures than other resinous flooring types. In fact, MMA flooring can be installed at temperatures well below freezing and put in service as soon as two hours after installation. To put that into perspective, other resinous flooring types can take as long as 24 hours to fully cure.

  Because MMA flooring promises quick return-to-service times, it is a popular option in commercial applications where shutting down operations is especially costly, such as manufacturing or retail facilities. And because MMA flooring can be installed at lower temperatures, it might be considered for a colder application such as a food plant freezer.

  MMA flooring systems wouldn’t be used in every application, however, because they are especially hard to install —MMA has a lower pot life and doesn’t bond as well to concrete as other systems— and tend to be more expensive.

• Polyaspartic flooring systems

  Polyaspartic coatings don’t cure quite as quickly as MMA coatings —they’re service-ready in about two to four hours depending on the product— but aren’t as odorous as MMA coatings during installation. And while polyaspartic flooring systems are more expensive than epoxy flooring systems, they tend to have better abrasion resistance and don’t yellow when exposed to UV light.

  Due to their good chemical and abrasion resistance, quick curing times and low levels of maintenance, polyaspartic coating systems can be used in a host of commercial and industrial applications from manufacturing facilities to airplane hangars.

• Urethane concrete flooring systems

  Urethane cement flooring systems are popular in food processing facilities due to its anti-microbial properties, and in practically every other industrial application for its good impact and chemical resistance.

  And because urethane concrete reacts to temperature change in much the same way as its concrete substrate, the coating can endure severe temperature fluctuations without de-bonding from the concrete substrate.

Resinous flooring enhances facilities, accommodating versatile design customizations, such as corporate logos for branding and aisle ways for wayfinding and traffic flow.

In addition, resinous flooring offers a wide range of other benefits, including:

• Strong slip resistance for enhanced safety
• Ease of maintenance and reduced upkeep costs
• Thermal shock resistance
• Sanitary, antiseptic surfaces that minimize bacteria and withstand regular power washing and harsh cleaning agents
• Resistance to heavy forklift traffic, tire marks, abrasions, oil, fuel, chemicals, road salt and other contaminants
• Minimization of static electricity and vapor pressure problems

You should work with an experienced flooring contractor to choose the resin floor product best-equipped to provide meet the design and performance needs of your application, while considering your budget and facility downtime requirements. They’ll not only have the product knowledge to guide you through your options, buy they’ll also have done enough maintenance to know how different resin types perform over time in applications similar to yours.

Testing and moisture mitigation

In our moisture mitigation and surface preparation services, we test your slab for potential moisture issues prior to installing your polished concrete or resinous flooring system. If the moisture levels in the slab exceed the manufacturers’ installation warranty, we’ll install a suitable vapor barrier product to eliminate any problems that may arise.

Through these value-added services, we get the job done right the first time, saving you up-front costs on labor and reducing long-term maintenance costs by extending the life of your floor — often by more than a decade.

Value-added flooring services

When you work with Spectra Contract Flooring, you get a rapidly delivered, high-quality project and total project management. Our highly-trained flooring crews are certified in delivering specialty flooring solutions and can even train specifically for the complexities of your project. We offer project planning, life-cycle costing, material selection and procurement, logistics, quality control and much more. Learn more about our value-added flooring installation services.

See our best work

We’ve completed large-scale commercial flooring projects for some of the biggest names in industry. Check out our portfolio to see some of the industrial flooring projects we’ve done.

Or, to learn how to reduce flooring costs, realize value and identify quality contractors, read our buyer’s guide to flooring contractors. You’ll learn pitfalls to avoid when evaluating costs — and how life cycle costing, material solutions and innovative installation can save you money. Download the guide today.