Epoxy floor vs. urethane mortar floor for food and beverage facilities
Urethane Mortar Floors (a/k/a cementitious urethane floors gold urethane cement floors) stand out over epoxy floor systems in food and beverage plants for many reasons; This USDA-accepted flooring material reduces downtime, is durable in harsh environments with thermal shock, and resists high impact and damaging chemicals. For new construction, urethane concretes can be applied to 10-day concrete, thus eliminating the typical 28-day wait for concrete to cure. The use of polyurethane cement mortar systems has now superseded standard epoxy floor coatings and vinyl ester flooring systems, such as Tufco flooring, in these special needs environments. Products like Ucrete, Flowcrete, PurCem and CastorCrete are gaining substantial market share. Tufco Flooring has even developed a urethane mortar floor system. These floors can be found in industrial kitchens in food and beverage processing industries such as meat/poultry, dairy, seafood, bakeries, breweries, and all beverage processing. Poultry and brewery flooring withstands some of the harshest conditions for industrial flooring. Urethane mortar floors can even withstand years of heavy service in these areas.
Compared to epoxy flooring, urethane flooring products have greater resistance to impact and abuse from dropped pots, steel parts and utensils in industrial kitchens and food plants. They handle repetitive scraping and scratching better than epoxy, acrylic and competitive systems. They are extremely beneficial in plant areas where steel wheels are used, such as bakeries. Urethane mortar floors are used as a waterproof floor, providing a “bathtub effect” in areas of the floor that require a waterproof floor. They are slip resistant when wet and provide a permanent slip resistant texture, due to the integral wear resistant aggregate, throughout the entire thickness of the flooring system.
Urethane cementitious mortars they have a modulus of elasticity and a thermal coefficient of expansion similar to those of concrete. When applied over concrete, brick or tile, it prevents delamination when the floor is stressed by thermal conditions. These food-grade flooring materials withstand hot spills and repeated thermal cycling (hot washdowns, steam cleaning, etc.) without breaking down. Additionally, cold temperature and moisture tolerance allows installation on cold (above freezing) and damp concrete surfaces, often found in operating food plants.
Cementitious coatings they have very little odor, since there are no VOCs. This means there is no risk of opening food products. Urethane Concrete Mortars It can be applied next to fully operational food processing areas, eliminating the need to shut down an operation to resurface the floor. One-pass installation without the need for a primer coat means that many floor refinishing projects can be completed on weekends, without costly production downtime. Besides, urethane cement floors It has excellent overall resistance to chemicals used in food and beverage plants.
The more durable urethane mortar floor systems are generally smoothed and applied at a thickness of ¼ to 3/8 inch and provide a uniform matte finish. These trowel-applied urethane mortars have physical properties twice those of concrete. Self-leveling “grout” systems were originally developed for contractors unable to install urethane mortar floors. These systems generally applied a thickness of 1/8 to 3/16 inch. They provide a tough surface in areas that require a high gloss urethane or polyurethane concrete topcoat, maximum cleanability and high aesthetics. Applications consist of screed, spread with natural quartz aggregate, and top coating. They are available with an epoxy novolac topcoat, allowing for installation in chemical storage areas with concentrated spills. These systems can also be finished with colored quartz or vinyl chips.
The original system, Ucrete HF, is a USDA Type FDA approved, trowel applied urethane flooring, and is the original system (has been around for over 40 years). It has stood the test of time in the harshest environments. The ¼-inch smoothed system offers the highest level of durability with a useful life of more than ten years. The only downside to urethane mortars is that they are a bit more expensive up front than epoxy; however, they offer long-term performance and the highest return on investment.