(Newswire.net — March 6, 2015) — Wouldn’t it be nice to have some High-Tec paint that can clean itself overnight, so you don’t have to wash your car so often? According to research published in the journal Science on Thursday, that self-cleaning paint is no longer just a dream.
A new paint developed by British and Chinese scientists, is self-cleaning, resilient to poor weather conditions and even small-scale mechanical damage, Reuters reported.
According to the scientists, the new repellent paint is made from coated titanium dioxide nanoparticles that are able to regain their structure even when mechanically damaged. The new paint is extremely repellent to water but, unlike other waterproof coatings, continues to work even when exposed to oil, scientists said.
“The biggest challenge for self-cleaning surfaces is finding a way to make them tough enough to withstand everyday damage,” said Claire Carmalt, a British professor of inorganic chemistry at University College London, who co-led the research.
“The surfaces tend to be mechanically weak and so they rub off easily. But by pairing our paint with different adhesives, we’ve shown it is possible to make a robust, self-cleaning surface.”
According to the Carmalt, different surfaces need different coating methods, it depends on the material. For example, to coat glass and steel, scientists used a spray-gun, for cotton wool they used dip-coating, and for paper a syringe.
UCL’s chemistry department scientist who co-led the study, Yao Lu, said that “Being waterproof allows materials to self-clean, as water forms marble-shaped droplets that roll over the surface, acting like miniature vacuum cleaners picking up dirt, viruses and bacteria along the way.”
For this to happen, the surface must be rough and waxy, Chinese professor Yao Lu said. “So we set out to create these conditions on hard and soft surfaces by designing our own paint and combining it with different adhesives,” he added.
According to the scientists, the result in all cases showed the materials became waterproof and self-cleaning, with water droplets of different sizes bouncing off them and taking dirt with them.
A great asset to the research is the finding that this continued even after the materials were scratched with a knife or scuffed with sandpaper, scientist explained.