Photothermal healing performance of a metal protection coating

Epoxy vitrimers with thermal-healing ability are widely studied to prolong the service life of materials. But the conventional preparation and healing strategy, involving external catalysts, preheating, hot press or/and heating the entire coating, are not applicable for the large-scale applications. In a new work, a room-temperature brushable oxidised carbon black (OCB)/epoxy vitrimer composite based on dynamic transesterification reaction with excellent protective performance and localized photothermal-healing was prepared by solvent method. No external catalysts, preheating and hot press was needed in the preparation process.

Ideal metal protective performance

The experimental results demonstrate that the composite coatings exhibited an excellent metal protective performance. The effective non-contact local photothermal-healing can be achieved in 20 Min., and the scratch width can apparently narrow over 95 % and the impedance moduli of the composite coatings can be recovered from 263 Ω·cm² to above 10⁸ Ω·cm². The OCB/epoxy vitrimer composite coating, combining ideal metal protective performance with non-contact local photothermal-healing performance, has great promise for many practical applications in large-scale, such as metal protection and solar-energy collector.

The study has been published in Progress in Organic Coatings, Volume 179, June 2023.