Ground_Support_August_2020 - 31

AVP SPECIAL
REPORT

"We can show you down to 5 centimeters
what got cleaned and what got missed and
why it got missed down to a very granular
level," he said. "What were the cleaning
settings, what was the floor type and you
can audit all of that. If you want to make
changes it will do that too."
The robots allow Cincinnati to reallocate
floor team staff to other areas of critical
importance while tackling the COVID-19
health crisis. The airport originally reexamined the housekeeper role at a time
when all airports are seeing a labor shortage for what was a low skill job and changing it into a higher skill position. Now it
allows them to examine if they can have
robots clean and disinfect areas that pose
a health risk for humans.

In the Hangar
The first step to ensure a safe and healthy
environment for maintenance crews is to
keep hangars or other maintenance facilities as clean as possible. Cleaning is simply
the process of removing soils from a surface, opposed to disinfecting, which will
destroy and kill microbes such as bacteria
and viruses. Regular floor cleaning with an
automatic scrubber is a key component to
an overall cleaning program.
"While disinfecting highly-touched
areas, such as door knobs, cabinet handles,
shared tools, faucets and similar is critical,
other surfaces, such as floors, may just need
to be cleaned well," explains Bryan Smith,
senior marketing manager, Americas, Tennant Company. "It is critical to remember
you can clean without disinfecting, but you
can't disinfect without cleaning first."
Generally, it is not recommended to disinfect floors outside of critical areas such
as food preparation areas or where bodily
fluids may contact the floor. So, a simple
sweep and scrub will do the trick when
taking care of a maintenance site.
Two industrial cleaning machines that
can aid in the cleanliness of floors are
sweepers and scrubbers, which help to
really scrub deep and keep floors clean.
Sweepers remove dry, lose soils and debris,
while scrubbers use water and detergent to
clean and dry the floor.
"Sweepers work with a combination
of spinning brushes that lift the soil and

Photo courtesy of Tennant Companies

debris along with a vacuum that pulls the
debris into a hopper," mentions Smith.
"Scrubbers use water with optional floor
cleaning chemicals to remove dirt, liquids,
grease and other soils. A scrubber sprays a
solution on the floor, scrubs with a brush,
and then automatically recovers the solution with a trailing vacuum and squeegee
leaving the floor nearly dry."
Both scrubbers and sweepers come in
sizes ranging from small walk-behind
machines to large riding machines and can
be battery- or engine-powered, depending
on the application needs.
"We have received many questions about

how our products can help prevent the
transfer of COVID-19," explains Smith,
adding Tennant launched its first autonomous floor scrubber, the T7AMR, last year.
"While there is a protocol Tennant has
published for disinfecting floors with our
equipment, the floor is not always going to
be the priority for disinfection," he continues. "The best way Tennant equipment can
help is by enabling cleaning teams to keep
the floors clean as efficiently as possible so
they have the time to do extra detail work
disinfecting the highly-touched surfaces
that are more critical to preventing disease
transfer."

An extended version of the article
can found online at
www.AviationPros.com/21133412.

AUGUST 2020

AviationPros.com

http://www.AviationPros.com/21133412 http://www.AviationPros.com

Ground_Support_August_2020

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