CHAPTER 7: UV-Cured Functional Coatings
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Published:24 Nov 2014
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M. Sangermano, I. Roppolo, and M. Messori, in Photocured Materials, ed. A. Tiwari and A. Polykarpov, The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2014, pp. 121-133.
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This chapter reviews the use of UV-curing technology for the preparation of multifunctional coatings. It is shown that the UV-curing process can be used as a good technique for the preparation of multifunctional coatings that could find advanced and innovative applications in fields such as automotive gloss-coatings, flooring varnish, scratch-resistant coatings, flexible electronics, conductive coatings, light-emitting diodes, lasers, fluorescence sensors, display devices and in heterogeneous photocatalysis. Scratch-resistant UV-cured coatings were achieved either via a top-down or a bottom-up approach while multifunctionality was achieved when antistatic additives were added to the photocurable formulation, obtaining crosslinked films characterized by high scratch resistance and antistatic properties. Conductive UV-cured films were obtained by adding CNTs or functionalized graphene sheets up to percolation thresholds or via the in situ metal nanoparticles formation through a photoreduction process. Photoluminescent UV-cured films were prepared by dispersing photoluminescent clusters Gd2O3:Eu3+ nanorods into a UV-curable acrylic or epoxy resin. Finally, titania, GOx and CNTs were used as photocatalysts showing a good photocatalytic efficiency when dispersed into UV-cured films.