Catheter‐associated urinary tract infections (CAUTIs) are one of the most commonly occurring hospital‐acquired infections. Current coating strategies to prevent catheter‐associated biofilm formation are limited by their poor long‐term efficiency and limited applicability to diverse materials. Here, the authors report a highly effective non‐fouling coating with long‐term biofilm prevention activity and is applicable to diverse catheters. The thin coating is lubricous, stable, highly uniform, and shows broad spectrum prevention of biofilm formation of nine different bacterial strains and prevents the migration of bacteria on catheter surface. The coating method is adapted to human‐sized catheters (both intraluminal and extraluminal) and demonstrates long‐term biofilm prevention activity over 30 days in challenging conditions. The coated catheters are tested in a mouse CAUTI model and demonstrate high efficiency in preventing bacterial colonization of both Gram‐positive and Gram‐negative bacteria. Furthermore, the coated human‐sized Foley catheters are evaluated in a porcine CAUTI model and show consistent efficiency in reducing biofilm formation by Escherichia coli (E. coli) over 95%. The simplicity of the coating method, the ability to apply this coating on diverse materials, and the high efficiency in preventing bacterial adhesion increase the potential of this method for the development of next generation infection resistant medical devices.

The equations of nematodynamics are formulated, solved, and used to model textural transformations in sheared thermotropic flow-aligning nematic polymers. The solutions are classified and characterized using analytical, scaling, and numerical methods. It is found that as the shear rate increases, the pathway between an oriented nonplanar state and an oriented planar state is through texture formation and coarsening. The two shear-rate dependent dimensionless numbers that control the texture formation and coarsening process are Ericksen Er and Deborah De numbers. The emergence of texture is independent of the Deborah number, and occurs at Er=10(4). As the shear rate increases and Er>10(4) the first texture that arises is a defect lattice. Further increases of the shear rate bring De close to 1, ignite the coarsening processes, and replace the defect lattice with a defect gas. The smallest texture length scale l(t) occurs at the defect lattice-defect gas transition. In the defect lattice regime the texture length scale decreases with increasing shear rate as l(t) proportional to (gamma-a)(-1/2), while in the defect gas regime it increases as l(t) proportional to (gamma-b sqrt[(gamma-a)]-c)(-1). Finally when De>2, an oriented monodomain state emerges, and the texture vanishes since coarsening overpowers defect nucleation. It is found that the texture transition cascade unoriented monodomain=>defect lattice=>defect gas=>oriented monodomain is remarkably consistent with the experimentally observed textural transitions of sheared lyotropic nematic polymers.

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