Study of Advanced Functional Coatings and their Applications

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Current coatings include conventional liquid versions and more environmentally friendly powder coatings. They are widely used in industry and in daily life. In recent decades, the need for different coating functions from the end applications has drawn increasing attention and prompted R&D efforts in both academy and industry. Emblematic functional coatings being profoundly investigated include hydrophobic/amphiphobic, hydrophilic, conductive, antimicrobial and low- or /high-refractive-index coatings etc. Despite the great scientific and technologic advancements of functional coatings (mainly in solvent borne) achieved in the past two decades, yet there exist some common challenges: the durability and the functionality are generally not met simultaneously, and in particular, it is rather intricate in fabricating durable transparent functional coatings. More importantly, functional powder coating is almost a virgin research field, and is face the same challenges along with more and more focuses being moved onto the green type of coating.*******There have been a large number of researches regarding functional coatings in the past few years and some coating manufacturers have commercialized coatings with various functionalities. Typical approaches employed in these researches and products are to incorporate functional agents, in particulate form or in liquid form, into the film-forming systems to attain the required functionalities. However, the commonly used techniques suffer from many problems such as the poor longevity, low mechanical strength and undesirable alternations to the film properties. The main root-causes of the problems are attributed to the poor dispersion, compatibility and bonding of the functional agents to the bulk of the coating systems.*******For functional coatings employing particulate form functional agents, unsatisfactory dispersion in and bonding to the film-forming system still remain as problems up to date, hampering the application of many functional coatings. For liquid form functional agents, compatibility issues between the agents and the film-forming materials greatly limit the range of selectable agents and the allowable agent dosages.*******The applicant proposed a platform-type approach which could provide solutions to these problems for most types of functional coatings. From the results of his early work, this approach demonstrated advantages over the current state of art. For coatings employing particulate-form functional agents, a novel fluidized plasma treatment of the agents showed incomparable enhancements in particle dispersion, compatibility and chemical bonding between the agents and the film-forming materials; for coatings using liquid-form functional agents, a porous-base-coat approach was proven to offer an efficient way to break the limits to the range of selectable functional agents and the allowable agent dosages.***