Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Coatings come in various forms, including traditional liquid coating and eco-friendly powder coatings. They find widespread application across various industries and in our daily lives. In recent decades, the demand for specialized coating functionalities in various end applications has garnered increasing attention, driving research and development efforts in both academy and industry, resulting in more and more commercialized coatings with diverse functionalities from. Exemplary functional coatings that are currently under extensive investigation encompass hydrophobic, hydrophilic, conductive, antimicrobial, and low- or high-refractive-index coatings. While significant scientific and technological progress, mostly for solvent-based coatings, has been made over the past two decades, common challenges persist. These challenges span a wide range, while the most common difficulty lies in achieving both durability and functionality simultaneously. As eco-friendly coatings, functional powder coatings represent a relatively unexplored research domain, yet facing similar challenges. The most common approach employed in research and product development is to incorporate functional agents, either in particulate or liquid form, into the film-forming systems to achieve the desired functionalities. However, the commonly used techniques encounter many issues, including limited longevity, reduced mechanical strength, and undesired alterations to the film properties. For functional coatings that utilize particulate-form functional agents, challenges persist in achieving satisfactory dispersion within the film-forming system and establishing strong bonds. In the case of liquid-form functional agents, compatibility problems between the agents and the film-forming materials impose significant constraints on the selection of agents and the allowed agent dosages. These issues continue to impede the widespread application of functional coatings. The applicant has put forth a platform-type approach aimed at addressing these persistent challenges across a broad spectrum of functional coatings. Early findings from the applicant's work, before and during the current NSERC DG project, suggest that this approach offers notable advantages over the current state-of-the-art methods. In coatings using particulate-form functional agents, plasma fluidized-bed treatment of the agents has demonstrated remarkable improvements in particle dispersion, compatibility, and chemical bonding between the agents and the film-forming materials. Meanwhile, for coatings incorporating liquid-form functional agents, an innovative porous-base-coat approach has proven to be an effective means of expanding the range of selectable functional agents and increasing the allowable agent dosages, thus overcoming prior limitations. The outcomes of the proposed research will largely eliminate the above-mentioned problems and pave a way for research and applications of functional coatings.