CNR - Institute for Energetics and Interphases, Via De Marini, 6, Genova, Italy.
CNR - Institute for Energetics and Interphases, Via De Marini, 6, Genova, Italy.
Adv Colloid Interface Sci. 2015 Aug;222:291-304. doi: 10.1016/j.cis.2015.01.005. Epub 2015 Jan 26.
Technological fields in which seawater is implied are numerorus, working in seawater (shipping, oil industry, marine aquaculture,..), and exploiting seawater in plants (cooling heat-exchange, desalination, power plants,..). All suffer from detrimental effects induced by biofouling mainly enhancing material failures and limiting energetic efficiencies. Among the remediation solutions, technologies coniugating economical, green and efficiency criteria should represent the direction. With the aim to meet these criteria, superhydrophobic (SH) technology attracted many researches for the protection of materials operating in contact with seawater.
In this work, the literature focusing on such technology for the protection of surfaces in contact with seawater has been reviewed, mainly focusing on boat and ship hull protection.
Despite the growing interest around SH technology in seawater for fouling control and friction drag reduction of hulls, to date literature shows that superhydrophobicity in seawater is still limited if compared with a time window compatible with technological needs (set on years). An evaluation of the causes of early superhydrophobicity loss under operative conditions clearly indicates that, to the best of present knowledge, a SH surface cannot preserve this feature by itself alone (especially in real seawater). Hence, we have considered to highlight the behaviour of SH surfaces in seawater in relation to early stages of biocolonization (conditioning film and pioneering bioslime formation). Considering the annual costs sustained for the biofouling impact control, advantages coming from SH surfaces, in terms of foul control and friction drag reduction, would allow economical savings allowing to cover both the appliance of longevity keeping strategies of the SH surfaces and investments in green technologies of SH coating life cycle (production, storing). In addition a brief outlook is provided on technological fields exploiting seawater in pipelines (power and desalination plants), where the SH surface finishing finds potentially interesting application for fouling and corrosion prevention applications.
涉及海水的技术领域众多，包括在海水中工作的领域（航运、石油工业、海水养殖等）以及在工厂中利用海水的领域（冷却热交换、海水淡化、发电厂等）。所有这些领域都受到生物污垢的不利影响，主要表现为材料失效加剧和能源效率降低。在修复解决方案中，结合经济、绿色和效率标准的技术应该是未来的发展方向。为了满足这些标准，超疏水（SH）技术因其在保护与海水接触的材料方面的优势吸引了大量研究。
本工作主要聚焦于船体防护，综述了用于保护与海水接触的表面的此类技术的文献。
尽管 SH 技术在控制海水生物污垢和减少船体摩擦阻力方面的兴趣日益浓厚，但迄今为止的文献表明，与技术需求（设定在数年）兼容的时间窗口相比，海水中超疏水的稳定性仍然有限。对操作条件下超疏水性能早期损失原因的评估清楚地表明，就目前所知，仅靠超疏水表面本身无法保持这种特性（特别是在实际海水中）。因此，我们考虑强调 SH 表面在海水中的行为与生物定殖的早期阶段（条件膜和先锋生物粘液的形成）之间的关系。考虑到因生物污垢控制而产生的年度成本，SH 表面在控制生物污垢和减少摩擦阻力方面的优势将带来经济节省，这不仅可以覆盖 SH 表面的长寿命保持策略的成本，还可以覆盖绿色 SH 涂层生命周期技术（生产、储存）的投资。此外，还简要展望了在利用海水的管道技术领域（发电厂和海水淡化厂）中的应用，其中 SH 表面精加工在防污和腐蚀方面具有潜在的应用前景。
