This Antifouling Coating Creates A 'Liquid Surface'

This Antifouling Coating Creates A 'Liquid Surface'

- Kim Kavin

If mussels foul your boat or dock on a regular basis, you might think the mollusk is the enemy. In reality, what you need to stop are the mussels’ byssal threads, or byssus, which the little buggers secrete like Spider-Man webbing when attaching themselves to solid surfaces. Stop the byssal threads from getting a grip, and no more mussels stuck to your hull or dock.

It’s a nifty trick, one that researchers think they’ve finally mastered — and that businessmen say will start appearing in new antifouling paint in early 2018. The magic material that is now advancing from the research phase to commercial use is called SLIPS, or Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces. SLIPS is a flexible silicone with a lubricant layer that essentially creates a liquid surface. It feels oily to the touch, and it has a reservoir in the coating’s pores to replace the liquid surface layer when it wears off. The design keeps the coating in a physical state that, to a mussel, seems different from a solid surface.

A recent study in the journal Science explains how researchers used SLIPS to confuse mussels enough that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, attach. In their first experiment, researchers placed Asian green mussels on a checkerboard of sorts, with each square covered in a different antifouling material. The squares with the SLIPS coating confused the creatures. Mussels probed those surfaces longer, didn’t release their byssal threads at all or shot out the threads in a different direction, where a surface they read as solid seemed to be a better choice for attachment.