How to mimic wood?

It is easy to create a synthetic floor but it’s a creative skill to develop a floor, which mimics another material. This goal in mind, Sika was able to create a new polyurethane based floor, which comes with the benefit of being a sustainable product as its resins are bio-sourced and fits therefore with the Sika’s sustainable strategy ‘more value – less impact’ and which mimics a teak deck. The new material is a liquid applied floor, which has self-leveling capacity, opening a twofold application possibility – one more traditional casted directly on the ship floor and another one, where every single panel of the deck can be prefabricated thus bonded to the ship deck by a similar manner as a traditional teak floor.

The prefabrication method does also open the possibility of the identical recreation of the wood pattern and in addition further design applications such as logos or even different color settings. But its light weight too does open up new ship/boat design option, helping to reduce the overall fuel consumption. The greatest achievement however comes with the patented cool-deck technology,  as the thermal conductivity and the density of the product was lowered, helping to transfer the heat built-up dynamically. As it has been shown by measurements a deck with Sikafloor® Marine 595 feels 10°C cooler (vice versa in a cold climate) than a standard deck covered by polyurethane solutions and is therefore comparable to native teak. Sika hopes to advance further in this technology and to be also able to offer this technology for other marine products or outside decoflooring in construction like balconies for warm countries.