Silicone Elastomer with Surface-Enriched, Nonleaching Amphiphilic Side Chains for Inhibiting Marine Biofouling

Silicone elastomer is one of the ecofriendly fouling release materials. However, it suffers from poor fouling resistant performance during idle periods. We developed a silicone elastomer with self-stratifying, nonleaching amphiphilic side chains by grafting telomer of dodecafluoroheptyl methacrylate (DFMA), poly(ethylene glycol) methyl ether methacrylate (PEGMA), and 3-mercaptopropyl trimethoxysilane (KH590) to bis-silanol terminated silicone. The amphiphilic telomer can be self-enriched on the surface during coating formation because the fluorocarbon segment with low surface energy is incompatible with silicone. Meanwhile, the telomer with KH590 can cross-link to silicone so that it is nonleaching. Such modified silicone elastomer has a low surface energy and low elastic modulus close to the unmodified one because most of the amphiphilic telomers are on the surface, so the former as a coating still has excellent fouling release performance. Moreover, it has remarkable fouling resistance toward marine bacterial biofilm and diatoms under a suitable molar ratio of DFMA and PEGMA (GF1P2). Such a modified silicone elastomer is expected to find application to inhibit marine biofouling.