Skin-mimetic: Transparent anti-corrosive coating
A new study presents a skin-mimetic assembly strategy for fabricating a transparent and highly anti-corrosive nanocomposite coating.
A transparent and anti-corrosive coating is of great importance for the protection of valuable articles, historical relics, and metal. However, there is a significant challenge due to the trade-off between high transparency and pleased anti-corrosive performance. The barrier function of skin, where hydrophobic corneocytes are parallelly embedded in lipids of the skin stratum corneum, offers an admirable concept to solve the problem. Herein, a novel bio-inspired assembly strategy is implemented to fabricate transparent and high-performance anti-corrosive epoxy nanocomposite coatings (Bio-MFICs), cooperating with superhydrophobic magnetic responsive graphene oxide nanosheets (FSO-GO) parallelly aligned in epoxy resin via magnetic-field-induced assembly and bridging structure further forming during curing process.
Transparent protective materials
The structure of Bio-MFICs is highly consistent with the structure of the skin stratum corneum, where FSO-GO nanosheets act as “corneocytes” and epoxy matrix acts as “lipids”. The subtle skin-mimetic structure contributes to the excellent anti-corrosive performance of Bio-MFICs because of the prolonged and blocked diffusion pathway of corrosive media. As a result, the resistance of Bio-MFIC-3 (0.75 wt% filler content) remains 4.17×107 Ω·cm−2, which is 43 times that of the pure epoxy coating. Moreover, the transparency of the Bio-MFIC-3 is highly close to that of the pure epoxy coating. According to the researchers, their work provides an effective method of constructing transparent protective materials to reduce the loss of materials and achieve the goal of energy-saving and greenhouse gas emissions reduction.
The study has been published in Progress in Organic Coatings, Volume 173, December 2022.
