PFI-TT: Creating highly efficient waterborne self-sanitizing coatings that incorporate novel additives

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) project is to significantly reduce the cost of antibacterial and anti-viral coatings. The technology utilizes a additive to create a layered coating structure, where antibacterial and antiviral reagents are concentrated at the top coating surface. The same concept can be extended to address many long-standing challenges in waterborne emulsion coatings, including water resistance, adhesion, surface hardness, and film formation. The technology proposed here can be further developed into a platform to control surface properties for broad applications including adhesives and biomedicine. In addition, the project will provide an opportunity to connect students, including female students and underrepresented groups and broaden their research horizons. The proposed education plan on project management skill training seeks to equip students with important professional skills that are critical to their job readiness and future success. The proposed project investigates the chemistry of forming a novel Janus particle additive, with different functional groups on the two sides of a single particle. These particles diffuse automatically to the coating surface and create a layered structure. By incorporating the antimicrobial functional groups on the particle surface, a new approach of creating optimized self-sanitizing surfaces may be invented. This proposal will explore design ideas for creating such particles and study the conditions to achieve a layered coating structure. The study seeks to reveal how particle surface chemistry is correlated with the coating structure formation and final coating performance. The new system offers an opportunity to study the potential synergistic effect of particle properties and self-sanitizing performance. This proposal may set the foundation for the commercialization of the new particle additives. It provides an alternative that improves surface properties by directing particle additives, without completely redesigning the original coating chemistry. The results ,may help guide future research directions of Janus particles and functional coating materials.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.