Bioinspired marine antifouling coatings: Antifouling mechanisms, design strategies and application feasibility studies

Abstract

Marine fouling is one of the major challenges facing humanity in marine industrial production and transport activities. Traditional antifouling coatings use toxic antifouling agents, which have not only poor antifouling longevity but also cause serious environmental problems. Humans have discovered that nature's creatures have evolved over a long period of time, optimized their respective anti-fouling strategies, and wanted to seek answers from them to get a near-perfect idea to obtain efficient, long-term, broad-spectrum anti-pollution and eco-friendly anti-pollution strategies. Therefore, more and more scientists are committed to developing green antifouling coatings. This paper summarizes the design strategy of bionic marine antifouling coatings, evaluates the antifouling performance, antifouling mechanism and antifouling effect of the coatings, and summarizes the development trend of bionic antifouling coatings. Finally, we present our views on the challenges of antifouling coatings and provide an outlook on future research directions and prospects.