International Journal of Environmental Science and Development

Abstract—Slips and falls are common incidences both at work and during leisure activities. Lack of friction on the floor surface has been blamed as the source of slips and falls. Friction of floor is one of the dominate factors affecting the risk of slips and falls. In general, a person is more likely to slip when walking on a floor contaminated with water or soapy solution than the dry surface. In this research, we conducted friction measurements on twelve floor tiles. The three surface conditions of the floors were dry, wet and soapy liquid contaminated conditions. The horizontal pull slip meter (HPS) was used. The measured coefficient of friction (COF) results showed that the HPS reported the COF readings on the same floor differently. It was found that floor tiles and surface condition were both significant on the measured COF. The HPS model defined in this study provides a mathematical description of the measured COF under the studied floor and surface.

Index Terms—Slip and fall, risk of fall, friction, horizontal slip meter.

Samsiya Khaday and Kai Way Li are with the Department of Industrial Management, Chung Hua University, Hsin-Chu, Taiwan (e-mail: seeya.031@gmail.com).

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Cite: Samsiya Khaday and Kai Way Li, "Friction Measurement on Common Floor Using a Horizontal Pull Slip Meter," International Journal of Environmental Science and Development vol. 10, no. 9, pp. 275-279, 2019.

Copyright © 2019 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).