Tired of product racks looking like the Leaning Tower of Pisa? Are you having to replace equipment due to damages caused by bad flooring? Are employees getting injured due to trips or damaged floors? If you answered yes to any of these, it’s time to get serious about floor flatness testing.
What is Floor Flatness Testing?
Floor Flatness is a measurement of how close a section of concrete is to planar, or more simply, whether the concrete slab has bumps of waves as you move across the slab. Floor Levelness is how close a section of concrete is to its intended slope (usually 0). Think about two different types of roadways. One is a dirt road in the planes of Nebraska and the other being an asphalt road in the hills of West Virginia. While the first road is not very flat, it does maintain a constant horizontal slope and typically is very level. The second road is a very smooth road, aka flat, but due to the changing terrain of going up and down hills, it is not very level. The testing of a concrete slab’s flatness and levelness is governed by ASTM E1155 and gives two numerical values: FF for Flatness and FL for Levelness. Improved floor flatness can help your bottom line and support a safe environment for employees.
How is Floor Flatness Measured?
Modern-day floor flatness and levelness test methods have made life easier for designers and end users of facilities with concrete floor slabs. In the not-too-distant past, concrete floor flatness was measured by laying a ten-foot straightedge on a finished floor and measuring the gap between the straightedge and the concrete over the span. If the gap was measured to be 1/8th inch or less, it was commonly considered to meet specifications. Since then, more reliable methods have developed utilizing point-to-point measurements that produce data, which can be used to develop a profile of the surface being measured in the form of a graph. As point-to-point measurements are obtained and data collected, differences in elevations at each point are recorded and visually represented by wavelengths. Multiple measurements are obtained throughout the field of the concrete floor surface. The data is collected using a floor profiler or equivalent.
As experienced engineers, our team at Mead & Hunt know it is our job to provide infrastructure that prioritizes safety and efficiency. Floor flatness testing is a vital part of this. We work to remain on the cutting edge of new technologies to provide reliable methods of floor flatness testing—to preserve both your financial investment and the safety of employees.
