ABSTRACT
The present work describes the frictional behaviour of ceramic tiles as flooring materials when soft and hard rubbers slide against them. The values of friction coefficient displayed by sliding of rubber against different types of flooring materials would be compared to that obtained from ceramic tiles under different sliding conditions: dry, water, water/detergent dilution, oil and water/oil dilution.
Based on the experiments carried out in the present work, it was found that at dry sliding soft rubber slid against ceramic tiles showed higher friction coefficient than hard one. The difference might be attributed to the extra deformation offered by soft rubber. The same trend was observed when sliding against ceramics wetted by water. The difference in friction coefficient displayed by hard and soft rubber significantly increased as the load increased. Soft rubber displayed lower friction than hard rubber when sliding against oil lubricated ceramic surfaces. In presence of oil/water dilution for soft rubber, friction coefficient showed no change with increasing applied load.
The comparative performance of the tested flooring tiles showed that at dry sliding, epoxy displayed relatively lower friction than cement and marble, while ceramic showed reasonable friction values. Cement tiles gave the highest friction coefficient. In the presence of water on the sliding surface, marble displayed the highest friction coefficient followed by cement and parquet. Ceramic tiles showed the lowest friction among the tested floorings.Sliding of rubber against water/detergent wetted tiles caused drastic decrease of friction coefficient, where marble displayed the highest friction values followed by parquet and cement. PVC, epoxy and ceramic represented the lowest friction values.Hard oily floorings such as cement, marble and ceramic showed higher friction. Parquet, PVC and epoxy tiles showed relatively lower friction.Finally, parquet, epoxy and cement tiles displayed the highest friction, while ceramic, PVC and marble showed the lowest friction when rubber slid against water/oil diluted floorings.