A Chemical Resistance Chart Is Not A Guarantee
Every manufacturer publishes one and every one of them is conditional. A meaningful specification has to name three things beyond the chemical itself: the concentration, the temperature at the point of contact, and how long the spill sits before it is cleaned up.
Ninety eight percent sulphuric acid at room temperature for ten minutes and thirty percent sulphuric at sixty degrees for three days are entirely different exposures. A resin can pass the first and fail the second comfortably.
So the first thing we ask for is the list. Everything stored, everything used to clean, the concentrations, and the realistic worst case for how long a release would stay on the floor before anyone deals with it. Incomplete disclosure is the most common reason containment linings fail, and it is almost always accidental.
Matching Chemical Resistant Floor Coatings To The Exposure
Standard epoxy handles mild chemistry and little else, so it is not an adequate specification for most containment duty. It is not an adequate specification for most containment duty and quoting it as one is how a cheap number gets reached.
Novolac epoxy is the workhorse of chemical resistant floor coatings. Its higher crosslink density gives it a genuinely wide range across strong acids and solvents, and it is what most bunded areas and process floors end up in.
Novolac vinyl ester sits above that for the most aggressive service, the strongest oxidising acids and higher temperatures.
Polyurea and polyurethane cure fast and stay elastomeric, so they bridge movement well, but they are weaker against some solvents. Where the room also sees hot washdown, urethane cement flooring is generally the better answer than any of these.
Chemical Resistant Floor Coatings Fail At The Details
The flat field of a bund is the easy part. What fails is the corners, the penetrations, the joints and the point where the lining turns up the wall.
A proper specification calls for reinforcement through the system, with the mat weight and the overlap stated rather than left to the installer, and additional layers at every corner and every penetration. The lining has to be coved at the floor to wall junction and carried continuously up to the containment height the bund was designed for. Every pipe entry, anchor bolt, sump and drain has to be detailed individually.
Moisture in the slab beneath is the other common failure. A lining with nowhere for vapour to go debonds and blisters just as any other coating does, so the slab gets tested before the system is specified.
We do not publish claims about which regulations our chemical resistant floor coatings meet, because the applicable requirements depend on your facility, what is stored and which permits you hold. What we do is build to the containment height, the chemistry and the detailing your engineer or your environmental consultant specifies, and put all of it in writing.
