Epoxy Flooring Project for Electric Vehicle Component Facility

Partnership with Knipl

We recently had the opportunity to partner with Knipl on an epoxy flooring project for a new electric vehicle component facility. Knipl is based in Budapest and distributes equipment for color technologies. They offer equipment for electrophoretic painting, KTL, powder painting, and material manipulation. The company also provides maintenance and installation services for the equipment they sell to industrial manufacturing facilities. As a turnkey partner to these manufacturers, providing a durable epoxy floor coatings option was important.

Designing a Containment System

Liquid Floors was approached with designing a system for containment pits under the powder coatings line. These areas need to be sealed to prevent powder coating products from penetrating the concrete slab. Uncoated concrete in these industrial areas are environmental concerns and could lead to contaminated soil or groundwater.

Importance of Powder Coating for Electric Vehicles

The client Knipl is working with will be building the frames that will house batteries in electric vehicles. The powder coating line will play a critical role in the safety of these vehicles. When compared to traditional internal combustion engines, electric vehicles must be engineered to accommodate battery weight and increased heat while charging. Powder coating the frame and battery tray is not done merely for aesthetics. These are amongst the most critical components of the electric vehicle, and safety is a major concern for automotive manufacturers. Protecting these areas from corrosion ensures the structural integrity of the vehicle’s chassis remains intact. Electric vehicle batteries are extremely heavy with an average weight of 1,000 pounds. Larger EVs like the GMC Hummer EV weigh a total of 9,063 pounds. The Ultium battery pack for this behemoth SUV weighs 2,923 pounds. The battery pack alone weighs more than GM’s lightest car, the Chevrolet Spark. In the instance of a crash, you can see why having these batteries secure is critical. Any corrosion or fail points can lead to disaster if one of these batteries turns into a loose projectile at highway speeds. Wearing your safety belt would be of little value if you found yourself in the wrong place during a high-speed accident!

Preparing the Concrete Floor

For the containment pits, Liquid Floors started out with aggressively diamond grinding the surface to open the pores of the floors and walls. This will allow the moisture-tolerant epoxy primer to penetrate and bond to the concrete. In all industrial flooring projects, proper preparation is the most critical step to a successful flooring project. If areas are overlooked or not cleaned prior to coatings, the entire system can be prone to failure. Our epoxy floor primer will go down at 23 mils with a notched squeegee. The squeegee will give us the coverage rate required and make the installation process easier for the crew. After this, we repeat the process with another coat of 100% solids epoxy. This coat will be pigmented and will help build the thickness of the overall flooring system. Once the epoxy has been allowed to fully cure, we will screen sand and thoroughly clean the surface with a Tennant T20 auto scrubber. These are large machines that increase productivity and reduce downtime. Tennant auto scrubbers help keep projects on schedule for our client.

Enhancing Durability with Urethane

Now that we have properly prepared the concrete floor, applied a primer to create a strong bond, and built up the thickness with a pigmented epoxy body coat, it’s time for another important step to increase durability. Many times, we will see epoxy left as a stand-alone flooring system. Epoxy flooring has many advantages along with some disadvantages. While epoxy is a great resinous coating to bond to bare concrete floors, it is not as abrasion or chemical resistant as urethane. ProRez Prothane can withstand the abuse of these harsh manufacturing environments.