Fluorinated zirconia-based sol-gel hybrid coatings on polycarbonate with high durability and improved scratch resistance

Custom-Made Chemically Modified Graphene Oxide to Improve the Anti-Scratch Resistance of Urethane-Acrylate Transparent Coatings

“…The fact that the pristine coating in this work already showed an anti-scratch hardness of 8H is an indicative of the high quality of the starting materials and formulation, comparing these samples with the results of other authors [8][9][10][11] (see Table 2). This is interesting by itself; nevertheless, the introduction of these adapted graphene derivatives opens a new range of applications in the protective coating industry, not only because the mechanical properties were improved remarkably, but also because they retained high transparency values, making them suitable for optical applications.…”

“…The methodology used is based on the Wolf-Wilburn method and ASTM standard D7027-05 [30]: the tip of AFM is indented in the surface of the coating and pushed back to perform a groove in the surface, performing all test with the same strength. The groove width is measured, and the anti-scratch resistance is calculated from the equation [10,31]:…”

“…Zhang et al [9] also improved the pencil hardness of a urethane-acrylate-based coating from 1H to 5H using 40 wt.% of nanosilica particles. Suriano et al [10] used zirconia with fluorinated resins to develop coatings over polycarbonate substrates, obtaining an improvement of the pencil hardness from 5B to HB. Previously, Wu et al [11] had used colloidal silica to improve the pencil hardness of a resin over a polycarbonate substrate from 2B to 5H.…”

Ultrastable and Durable Silicone Coating on Polycarbonate Surface Realized by Nanoscale Interfacial Engineering

“…Polycarbonate (PC) is the most commonly used transparent engineering plastic in various areas, such as packing, automobiles, food industry, helmet windows, marine, and even aviation, due to its excellent optical properties, low cost, melt processability, considerable thermal stability, and high impact resistance. − However, PC has disadvantages including low hardness and vulnerability under UV irradiation, which make it easy to scratch and shorten its service life. − One important approach to mitigate these issues is the application of a thin protective coating layer on the PC surface which is in contact with the outer environment without interfering its bulk property. − Silicone resin has been widely recognized as an effective coating material because of its high flexibility, transparency, water resistance, abrasive resistance, and environmental stress cracking resistance. ,, …”

Advanced hybrid nanomaterials

“…Since these origins, the field of hybrid materials has developed into a broad scientific and technological subject including important fields such as sol-gel chemistry [4,5], polymer nanocomposites [6,7], and hybrid nanomaterials [8,9]. Nowadays, hybrid materials are almost everywhere and provide a wide range of applications from biology and health, to photonic devices, catalysis and environment, smart coatings, energy, and electronics [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]. By essence, the hybrid approach consists of building new materials and devices by assembling elementary functional organic/inorganic, molecular or extended bricks to obtain materials with greatly improved or even completely new properties.…”