If you're a Designer or Architect you've probably heard of resilient flooring. Maybe you’ve been tasked with your first healthcare design project, or you’ve made the career change from residential design to commercial. If resilient flooring isn’t a product you’re familiar with, or you know the basics and would like to be able to explain resilient flooring in a deeper way, you've come to the right place.
Mannington Commercial started making sheet vinyl in Salem, NJ, when John Boston Campbell founded Mannington over 100 years ago. In early 1958, Mannington rolled out its first 12-foot wide format sheet vinyl flooring, an innovative product called “Vinyl-Tex." To this day we are the flooring leader in the healthcare industry because of our resilient sheet products.
We’re going to do a deep dive into resilient flooring available today, how it’s made and where each type should be used.
After raising your resilient flooring IQ you will be able to:
They include:
According to the Resilient Floor Covering Institute, or RFCI:
Resilient flooring is defined like this, “a non-textile floor that provides underfoot comfort and characteristically bounces back from repeated traffic or compression.”
Basically, resilient flooring is anything where the wear surface is non-textile, non-wood and non-stone – so anything that is not carpet, hardwood or laminate, stone, ceramic or concrete.
Laminate does start to approach the resilient category, because of its multilayer construction, but ultimately, it’s too wood-based to be considered resilient – it doesn’t “bounce back.”
Primarily resilient products are available in sheet, tile and plank.
Many companies sell sheet vinyl in 6 or 12 foot widths. Mannington offers multiple sizes to not only help in corridors but throughout an installation. The benefit is less waste, less seams, quicker install which also translates to less cost to install our product vs. competitors.
On the sheet side, there are both homogeneous and heterogeneous products, which we’ll get into in just a moment. These products include: sheet vinyl, sheet rubber, linoleum, and any other non-carpet products in roll form.
Related: Sheet Vinyl vs. Luxury Vinyl Tile: Best Flooring For Infection Control
The best way to tell a homogeneous product from a heterogeneous product is to flip the product over and look at the back vs. the front.
Essentially, if the product looks the same on both sides, it’s homogeneous. So, that would include traditional homogeneous sheet vinyl, rubber, VCT, solid vinyl tile, and cork – though you can have cork floor tiles with a layered, heterogeneous construction.
Meanwhile, you can tell when a product’s heterogeneous because it doesn’t look the same on the top and bottom. Plus, it’s made up of several layers in the middle of the construction. This would include LVT, multilayered flooring, and heterogeneous sheet vinyl or printed sheet vinyl.
Hybrid products, sometimes called inlaid products, are essentially a single layer, but may have a thin backing or some thin inner construction layer like a fiberglass layer for dimensional stability – but more than 95% of the product is made up of a single layer.
These include products like inlaid sheet vinyl and linoleum, which usually look like a homogeneous product from the top with that chip visual, but have a thin backing layer.
Related: What is Luxury Vinyl Tile (LVT)?
This process starts off with taking the raw materials that go into the base of the products – materials like plasticizers, resins, and limestone – and putting them into giant mixers. Then the mixture is calendered out. Calendering is basically sheeting the product; think of it as a big pasta maker, where you take the dough and you slip it through a roller to create a thinner, spread-out noodle that has your desired thickness.
That’s what happens in this calendering process: a batch of material is mixed that is then brought through the calender.
Then, the sheet goes through a series of blades or slicers that breaks the product into the appropriate chip size.
Those chips are then screened, using a screen that allows the right chip size to pass through and continue on with the process. The chips that don’t pass through the system can be reground back into the mixer and used again in the process.
So, we have screened out this desired chip size.
Those chips are then brought to – in this example – a tile line.
There can be multiple different chips blended together in this example.
In a homogeneous sheet product, instead of taking those chips, calendering them out and then punching them into tile, the chips are fed into large hoppers and onto a continuous moving belt.
In the photo below, a variety of colors are represented – assume each one of these colors represents a different chip – maybe a different chip size, a different chip color, and they are all being blended together to make this specific example of sheet. As the belt moves down the line, all the chips are scattered together.
Once the chips are laid out appropriately on the belt, they go through a series of consolidating rolls, which bring the product to its desired thickness.
Once the sheet is cooled, it is passed through a coater. In the case of a lot of homogenous sheet, or inlaid sheet, this could be a urethane coating that will give it performance attributes like resistance to stains, scuffs, and scratches.
And then on to the finished product.
Attributes of homogeneous products include things like chip and marbleized visuals.
In the pictures at the top, you can see a couple homogeneous visuals with different levels of chip variegation and chip contrast.
The chip-based marbleized visual – along with the wear layer and the pattern – are one in the same. As traffic wears down the layer, the visual is worn down as well.. Often there is a polymeric binder used in production so that the chips stay bound together.
In terms of texture, the products lay very flat and smooth, or they can be embossed. Mechanical embossing, uses an embossing cylinder to press into the surface of the finished product creating a topical undulation or texture. This helps create a better coefficient of friction, and wicking moisture away from the foot to help with slip resistance as well.
Under a microscope, this is what homogeneous products look like, in a cross-section view.
The diagram is an example of a heterogeneous manufacturing process.
In this example, It starts with a carrier – with either a felt backing or a fiberglass backing it is rolled through a coating, which may be adding a layer of vinyl onto it.
The coated backing is then heated up in an oven to cure it, making sure it is a flat, smooth, perfect finish that will eventually serve as a canvas for the next step in this process, the printing! At this point in the process a heterogeneous product has already been created with two different layers.
From there, manufacturers take that first green roll all the way to the left – that pregelled, felt substrate – then it goes through a series of rotogravure print stations. Rotogravure printing is pictured here: A series of printing cylinders, just like printing a newspaper.
Each one of those cylinders has a different part of the pattern, and it will add a different layer of the color as well. Typically, solid colors are added to each one of those print cylinders. These inks are often transparent. They layer on top of each other, and by the time the printing is all the way to the right you’re looking down onto several layers of printed inks and several different elements of the pattern.
Put it all together and it’s the overall visual. So, this is rotogravure printing, the traditional way to get a printed or patterned vinyl product. The newest printing technique for vinyl tile, specifically, is digital printing. Digital printing, requires a process more akin to an inkjet print-out as the visual or décor film of the product. This gives you a really wide scope of design and color possibilities, as well as easier customization possibilities.
From a printed layer, the product moves on to the wear-layer step of the process in heterogeneous manufacturing, in this example, we’ve taken that pregelled felt; printed on it, and now it needs a coating on top. This may be a vinyl coating that will eventually be saturated with urethane for performance attributes. The sheet is heated again to cure it – to get it, eventually, to dimensional stability.
Fusion and expansion is the last major step in the production of a heterogeneous product.
There are different ways manufacturers can use the fusion and expansion period, from a design and performance perspective.
They can do things like chemical embossing, where a chemical retardant is laid on certain areas of the printed visuals so that when it’s heated, the areas where the chemical retardant sits will not foam up.
If you see a wood knothole in the printed visual, the chemical retardant can go on top of the knothole, and in the eventual embossed version of the product, the knothole can actually be felt as if it were a real hardwood product.
Let’s look at some of the resulting constructions of the heterogeneous manufacturing process.
Heterogeneous has become the most popular of the resilient structures, with the evolution of products like Luxury Vinyl Tile. In fact, LVT is by far the fastest growing flooring segment in the industry, growing more than 43% in sales between 2017 and 2018.
So, why the popularity? Instead of working off a homogeneous chip visual, it’s a printed visual, whether rotogravure or digital, anything is possible. That is one of the big benefits of heterogeneous flooring. With great printed visuals, there are endless style and design capabilities.
Again, note that in heterogeneous structures, the layers are dissimilar. There is a wear layer on top of the printed layer to protect the visual, as well as carrier or backing substrates to provide stability, performance and installation advantages.
From a performance perspective. We’ll break them into 4 main parts, from top to bottom.
In the case of multi-layered flooring, or MLF, which are things like rigid core LVT like Mannington’s City Park and Mannington Crown collection or wood polymer core LVT (WPC), the backing or an additional inner layer before the backing is going to be a built-up solid core. It’s basically taking LVT and giving it more rigidity, more strength so that it can be installed without as much subfloor prep. It also gives the product some added stability in heat and humidity. So, each layer has its own function and its own purpose in that heterogeneous construction.
All in all this topic is layered. Get it? Layered.
VCT, MLF, LVT, Rotogravure, Calendering, this stuff is not for the faint of heart. Knowing the lingo is half the battle, and you’ve got this article to reference for that.
When it comes time to spec a resilient flooring product don’t panic, you can now know you’ve got the right product in the right application.
If you’re interested in putting your new flooring knowledge to the test, we have an accredited CEU on this topic that your local sales representative would be happy to present.
Would you like to learn more about resilient flooring while earning AIA/IDCEC CEU credits?
Click below to request a CEU.