Bioinspired Slippery Solutions for Marine Fouling Prevention

Abstract

Recent decades have seen an uptake in the development of non-toxic fouling prevention treatments, especially for marine applications. This trend is driven by technological innovation as a deeper understanding of material and adhesion science allows for the design of more effective repellent surfaces. Additionally, an ever-tighter regulatory framework makes the state-of-the-art biocidal coating technologies ever less desirable. A major challenge for the development of novel, non-toxic adhesion prevention coatings is the size of the available design space, with an innumerable number of possible coating systems and materials combinations. As there is still no broad mechanistic understanding for the specific factors that govern a coatings biofouling prevention performance, the enormous number of possible approaches creates the need for a reliable screening and down-selection tool. In the framework of this thesis a simple bioassay, based on the adhesion of biofilms of the green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, is developed to explore the design space of the Slippery Liquid Infused Porous Surfaces (SLIPS) as biofouling prevention treatments. Using this novel screening tool, we were able to identify several highly promising SLIPS coating solutions out of dozens of candidate systems. The initial screening study results were followed up with an extensive series of field studies which did not only demonstrate that specific SLIPS treatments have the biofouling prevention performance and longevity to function in the ocean for up to two years, but also allowed to investigate the mechanisms behind their efficacy. The potential that is offered by effective bioassay application for the identification of promising coating systems, the unraveling of the underlying performance mechanisms and the detection of interesting material properties and phenomena is demonstrated and discussed in this thesis.