Engineering the Properties of Transparent Hybrid Coating toward High Hardness, Excellent Flexibility, and Multifunction

Abstract

Transparent functional coatings with glass-like hardness and polymer-like flexibility are highly desirable for flexible and foldable displays. Although several coatings have been developed toward this goal, achieving a functional coating with 9H pencil hardness and extremely low bending radius of curvature (r c) remains a great challenge due to the inherent conflict between hardness and flexibility. To overcome this trade-off, a facile strategy is developed herein. The coating is an organic–inorganic hybrid nanocomposite that is prepared from thiol–acrylate polymerization of acrylo polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane and multifunctional thiols. The former provides the desired hardness, while the latter affords high flexibility and the maximum level of chemical bonding for organic–inorganic phases. Because of the good miscibility and varied functionality of monomers, we are able to manipulate the composition and internal structure of coating systematically, endowing it with high transparency (98%, 550 nm), super hardness (9H), excellent low modulus (1.85 GPa, the most flexible one to date), and the ability to withstand steel wool’s abrasion and repeated bending (r c = 0.8 mm) 10 000 times on PET film. On the final coating, both antifouling and antibacterial abilities are integrated without sacrificing its other properties after postfunctionalizing a zwitterionic layer. This work balances the hardness–flexibility conflict effectively and provides some useful protective coatings for next-generation displays.

Flexible Transparent Hydrophobic Coating Films with Excellent Scratch Resistance Using Si-Doped Carbonized Polymer Dots as Building Blocks

“…In addition, its critical inward and outward bending diameter could reach 1 mm (Figure I). As shown in Figure , results of some recent studies ,,,,,, and our work on flexible protective coating are plotted in Ashby maps to visualize material properties.…”

Thin lamellar films with enhanced mechanical properties for durable radiative cooling

“…(1) To evaluate the thermal stability in long-term direct exposure to the sunlight, AMTA was sandwiched between two Al plates and placed on a heating stage at 180 °C for 8 h. (2) To mimic the unexpected rainstorm environment, AMTA was rinsed under the high-speed (~6 m/s) water jet for 8 h. (3) Scratch damage test was orthogonally applied onto the AMTA (8×8 cm) surface under a normal load, over a distance of 6 cm at a constant scratch rate of 2 cm/s. Scratch resistance tests 47 were performed in a cyclic reciprocating steel-wool wear apparatus, illustrated in Supplementary Fig. 25a .…”

Effect of POSS Size on the Porosity and Adsorption Performance of Hybrid Porous Polymers

“…Polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxanes (POSS, (R-SiO 1.5 ) n , n = 6, 8, 10, 12, etc. ), are one class of nanosized hybrid nanoblocks of interest in many research areas, including self-organized system-related materials, − polymer nanocomposites, − and inorganic–organic hybrid functional coatings. − With the rigid three-dimensional (3D) configuration, high reactivity, and hybrid nature, , in particular, an intriguing feature of similarity to the secondary building units of zeolites, POSS have also been considered as ideal nanoblocks to develop advanced HPPs. ,− To date, many studies on the geometry effect of aromatic linking units, such as linear-, planar-, tetrahedral-, propeller-, and ladder-like units, ,,− have revealed that the topological combination of POSS with these linking units can tune the porosity and yield various POSS-based porous materials (PPMs) with high performance. However, most studies on PPMs focused on T 8 POSS, and studies on the geometry effect of larger POSS such as T 10 , T 12 , and other compounds are limited (Figure a).…”