Structure-Based Design of Anti-Fouling Polymer Nanocoating

Fouling is the undesirable accumulation of a material on a wide variety of objects, such as medical devices, ship hulls, and membranes, and has now become a widespread global problem from land to ocean with both economic and environmental penalties. Here we report a radically new designed polymeric coating that is a few nanometers thick (“polymer nanocoating”) with an anti-fouling property. It is found that the anti-fouling property of this polymer nanocoating is generalizable to various homopolymer systems regardless of their hydrophilicity/hydrophobicity and their surface energy. This is attributed to the highly packed chain conformations via the self-organization process of the adsorbed polymer chains on the impenetrable solid surfaces. Furthermore, the preparation of the polymer nanocoating is a simple and versatile top-down approach based on good solvent rinsing. We hypothesized that the origin of the anti-fouling property is the highly packed conformation of polymer chains with a large number of segment/solid contacts within a two-dimensional space. This finding facilitates a simple and versatile structure-based design of an anti-fouling coating using common types of synthetic polymers.