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FLOOR SURFACE
TC 476
Creating good friction: Pitt engineers aim to make floors less slippery Swanson School collaborators Kurt Beschorner and Tevis Jacobs will use a NIOSH award to measure floor-surface topography and create a predictive model of friction.
scale. The University of Pittsburgh’s Kurt Beschorner and Tevis Jacobs will use an award from the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health (NIOSH) to measure roughness on the smallest scales ever measured. They will use those measurements to build a model of friction performance with the long-term goal of innovating high-friction flooring to prevent occupational slips and falls. “More than 140,000 workers1 suffer from fall-related injuries each year, and about half of them result from a slip,” said Beschorner, associate professor of bioengineering. “Designing specific, high-friction flooring could mitigate these injuries, but we need a better understanding of the flooring factors that lead to friction.”
Friction is the resistance to motion of one surface or object moving relative to another. The frictional relationship between two objects has beneficial effects: when you strike a match, friction lights a flame; when you use your vehicle’s brakes, friction helps bring it to a stop. This same relationship, when leveraged properly, can help prevent slips and falls in the workplace. Friction is caused, in part, by small features on the two surfaces in contact. Even if a floor may look smooth there is still some degree of topography; however, these roughness features can be difficult to measure, especially on a small
“To date, despite research worldwide, no one has yet reliably connected flooring topography to friction measurements for flooring,” said Eric Astrachan, executive director of the Tile Council of North America. “This is the ‘Holy Grail’ for flooring design, where an understanding of measurable topography parameters --parameters that also affect aesthetics and cleanability-- can be used in the design phase to engineer flooring slip resistance.” Studies suggest that small-scale topography --raised features resembling a mountain range on the micron or nanometer scale-- is key to managing slips on a surface. Beschorner and
1: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject (Data from 2018): CSU00X0000006E100, CSU00X42XXXX6E100, CSU00X0000007E100, and CSU00X42XXXX7E100, U.S. Department of Labor, Editor. 2020, Department of Labor.
