Preparation Of Well-Controlled Copolymer Of Perfluoroalkyl Acrylate And Its Anti-Fouling In Coating

UV-curable coatings have been widely used in decorating and protecting of mobile phones, tablet computer and other consumer electronics product, because of their economical and ecological advantages and high performance coating, e.g. high scratch resistance and chemical resistance, superior toughness, etc. But the coating has frequent skin contact in use, the fingerprints, skin oil and ink stains are easy to foul its gloss surface, are hardly to be cleaned. Thus creating an anti-fouling surface by UV coating is of interest. Hydrophobic and oleophobic properties obtained with polymeric coatings containing fluorine and silicon can solve such problems. Well-defined block and multiarms star-block copolymers of perfluoroalkyl acrylate and acrylates had been prepared, respectively by ambient temperature reversible addition fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) radical polymerization, and "Arm First" method and RAFT polymerization in this paper. Their structures were characterized by 1H NMR and GPC The effects of chain structure on the polymer surface morphology, the relationships between coating surface properties and antifouling capability were investigated in detail using DSC, contact angle measurement, and AFM. The results demonstrated that: (1) The fluorinated acrylic block copolymers had distinct microphase-separated structure because of the incompatibility between P(MA-ran-nBA) and PFAEA blocks, and they have special chain structure with several FAEA units could be used for fabricating special chain structure surface. The water contact angle can reach 110°maximum as adding these resin to the conventional UV-curing coatings. (2) Based on the natural biomimetic hydrophobic phenomenon, the fluorinated multi-arms star-block copolymer also exhibited distinct microphase-separated structure. The coating surface compare to fluorinated crylate block copolymers has fabricated a more regular and orderly dandelion-like structure with diameter of 40～70 nm. The water contact angle was 116°as adding this resin to the conventional UV curing coatings. The fluorinated acrylic block and multiarms star-block copolymer can crosslink with substrate ingredients to form the dandelion-like coating surface with hydrophobic, oleophobic and antifouling capability.