关键词: 海洋防污, 抗贻贝粘附, 聚合物刷, 自由基聚合

Abstract: The Earth's oceans cover a vast area (approximately 71% of the earth's total surface). Marine transport is an important part of international trade, which cannot be ignored for social and economic development. Due to the oceans' complex environment and biodiversity, various fouling organisms are easy to adhere to marine equipment such as ships and oil platforms. For example, mussels and other invertebrates are firmly attached to the surface of ship hulls by secreting biological adhesives. Due to the massive adhesion of fouling organisms, the weight of the hull increases and the surface becomes rougher, which leads to increased energy consumption during operation and causes significant economic losses. In order to prevent further damage, much money is invested every year in the regular cleaning of ship surfaces and the maintenance of marine installations. Therefore, it is essential to develop economical and effective marine antifouling coatings.
In order to prevent fouling organisms from adhering to underwater surfaces, the application of antifouling coatings is the simplest and most widely used method currently. Nevertheless, conventional antifouling coatings usually kill fouling organisms by releasing toxic materials such as organo-tins and cuprous oxide, which cause irreversible damage to marine ecology. Therefore, the development of efficient and environmentally friendly marine antifouling coatings has become a popular research topic. Polymer brushes are linear polymers with a brush-like structure anchored to a surface at one side. Surface-initiated radical polymerization is a widely used polymerization method that can be grown in-situ on various initiator-modified surfaces, and many researchers are currently using surface-initiated radical polymerization to synthesize polymer brush layers for investigations related to anti-protein adhesion and anti-bacterial applications, with good results, showing that polymer brushes have great potential for application in the field of anti-biofouling. Thus, we synthesized the functional polymer brush coating for mussel adhesion resistance, and used its catalytic effect to oxidize the catechol groups, significantly reducing the adhesion of mussel adhesion proteins. It is found that the PTEMPMA polymer brush coating is grafted on the initiator-modified surface by the SI-Cu0CRP strategy, and the PTEMPOMA polymer brush coating is obtained by oxidation. The surface roughness is characterized after dopamine hydrochloride immersion experiments and real mussel immersion experiments. The polymer brush coating shows the excellent anti-mussel adhesion performance and good stability after immersion.
Nowadays, with the development of sustainable economy, it has become an inevitable trend to develop economical, efficient and environmentally friendly new types of marine antifouling coatings, especially for the anti-adhesion research of specific species (e.g. mussels and barnacles). The use of nitroxide radical functionalized polymer brush coatings for anti-mussel adhesion meets expectations in terms of both principle and experimental results, and the findings may provide new insights into the development of new marine antifouling coatings.

Key words: marine antifouling, anti-mussel adhesion, polymer brush, free radical polymerization