Biodegradable Polymer/Clay Composites For Marine Anti-biofouling Applications

Marine biofouling is a worldwide problem. It is urgent to develop environment-friendlysystems to inhibit marine biofouling since the coatings containing tributyltin (TBT) werebanned in2008due to their harm to the ecology. In this thesis, poly(ε-caprolactone)(PCL)/clay/antifoulant composites have been prepared by solution mixing. The main resultsare discussed as below:We prepared PCL/clay composites via solution mixing and demonstrates that such acomposites show higher degradation rate in seawater and significantly improved adhesionstrength in comparison with PCL. As revealed by the results of polarizing optical microscope(POM) and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) measurements, this is because thepresence of clay decreases the spherulite size of PCL while the crystallinity slightly varies.However, when the clay amount increases, the spherulite size of PCL decreases and thenslightly changed while the crystallinity nearly keeps constant in the range of clay amount.Further investigation indicates that the PCL/clay composite can serve as carrier of antifoulants,where the antifoulants can be uniformly released as PCL degrades. Marine field tests revealthat the PCL/clay/antifoulant system shows good anti-biofouling ability due to itsself-renewal property and uniform release of antifoulants.