Highly Adhesive and Scalable (Super)hydrophobic and Anti-fouling Coatings for Industrial Applications

Materials and equipment (MAE) used in industry in general, including processing industries and also the oil & gas and maritime sectors can be exposed to crude oil and water (both fresh and sea water, with potential for ice formation). Thus they can become fouled with time. This can have adverse implications in relation to performance, energy consumption as well as costs, e.g. suspension of commercial activities in order to restore fouled MAE. Industrially, anti-fouling development effort has been largely focused on seagoing vessels, where anti-fouling coatings have evolved from ones based on harmful biocides to current effort on biocide-free coatings. The latter are hydrophobic and based on organic-inorganic nanomaterials. However, there are a number of applications in oil and gas sector where fouling of much smaller (than ship hulls) but important MAE is a critical problem. There is the need for research and development effort to address specific challenges in these areas. InNano has recently undertaken this challenge with a few companies. For example, we have demonstrated a 5 times improvement in the lifetime of a BP oil well turbine flow meter (before cleaning of the fouled surface and re-calibration), besides initiating or running test projects to address fouling challenges with 3 other companies. Our recent results and evaluation point strongly to the need to develop and optimize specific pre-coating solutions in order to enhance the performance of our coatings, which are based on the environmentally friendly and biocide free polymer-inorganic nanohybrids. In this pre-project, we focus on optimising plasma, chemical blackening, and grit blasting processes as pre-coating treatments of MAE. These are necessary to condition their surfaces for improved bonding with coatings and/or impact micro and nano patterning which is useful for enhanced liquid repellency. The final aim is to enhance the performance of the coatings in harsh operational environments.