Silicone Elastomer with Surface-Enriched, Nonleaching Amphiphilic Side Chains for Inhibiting Marine Biofouling

Abstract: Silicone elastomer is one of the ecofriendly fouling release materials. However, it suffers from poor fouling resistant performance during idle periods. We developed a silicone elastomer with self-stratifying, nonleaching amphiphilic side chains by grafting telomer of dodecafluoroheptyl methacrylate (DFMA), poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate (PEGMA), and 3-mercaptopropyl trimethoxysilane (KH590) to bis-silanol terminated silicone. The amphiphilic telomer can be self-enriched on the surface during coating formation because the fluorocarbon segment with low surface energy is incompatible with silicone. Meanwhile, the telomer with KH590 can cross-link to silicone so that it is nonleaching. Such modified silicone elastomer has a low surface energy and low elastic modulus close to the unmodified one because most of the amphiphilic telomers are on the surface, so the former as a coating still has excellent fouling release performance. Moreover, it has remarkable fouling resistance toward marine bacterial biofilm and diatoms under a suitable molar ratio of DFMA and PEGMA (GF1P2). Such a modified silicone elastomer is expected to find application to inhibit marine biofouling.

章链接：https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsapm.9b00253