Fouling of petroleum processing equipment is a significant problem in the industry. With a stain-resistant surface, your goods will gain significant performance advantages in oil and gas applications. Alfa Chemistry has created coatings with unique properties for a variety of items that are utilized in hostile settings, such as the oil and gas industry.
Alfa Chemistry's antifouling coating technique can be applied to a range of substrates to increase the surface repellency of hostile liquids and materials, as well as the substrate's resistance to fouling by impurities like oils and paraffin. Our high-performance nanoscale antifouling coatings have been shown to greatly reduce the risk of fouling compounds contaminating a wide range of substrates, including metallic and polymeric materials. Please get in touch with us so we can collaborate on a successful antifouling product!
Why Do You Need An Antifouling Coating?
Antifouling coatings are available from us, and they can be utilized to solve a range of issues in oil and gas applications. Here are some scenarios in which our membrane coatings could help you increase the quality of your products.
- Contamination on your goods is difficult to remove and takes time.
- Dirt can stifle your product's performance.
- Parts of your product that are contaminated cannot be cleansed and must be trashed.
- The optical sensor may become clogged with oil, preventing it from working properly.
Suitable Antifouling Coating Solution
We can also condense transparent polyvinyl butyral (PVB) coatings with zwitterionic compounds to enhance antifouling properties. The zwitterionic precursor is first synthesized. The siloxane group is then incorporated into PVB through its easy condensation to prepare an antifouling coating. The coating offers strong oil repellency and anti-fouling capabilities due to the presence of zwitterionic groups, whereas PVB has outstanding mechanical qualities and excellent optical clarity. The improved PVB coating has excellent substrate adhesion and water resistance, making it ideal for use in marine exploration equipment.
Fig 1. A schematic illustration of the preparation of transparent coating with fouling resistance. (a) The assembly process of the KH560 molecular layer, (b) the procedure of preparing the PVB-X%TPAPS coatings, (c) the molecular formulas of PVB, TPAPS and the schematic diagram of the condensation reaction between them. (Zhang J. B, et al. 2021)
Experiments have revealed that the novel fluorine-based coating we developed offers good protection against oil deposits on the substrate surface. It offers good hydrophobicity and oleophobicity for rapid and effective low separation of oils and solvents, decreasing deposit fouling, enhancing product performance, and lowering costs.
We bonded the new fluorine-based coating to rough stainless steel surfaces and used oil droplet contact angle measurements to assess the substrate's oil and solvent resistance. The higher the contact angle, the more resistant the surface is to oil and solvents. The fluorine-based coating resulted in a greater contact angle, showing that the stainless steel was successfully made oleophobic.
We also examined the surface's wettability and contact angle after exposing the fluorine-based coating's surface to a high temperature (300°C) for 90 hours. The findings suggest that the covering is thermally stable.
Reference
- Zhang J. B, et al. (2021). "Imparting Strong Antifouling Properties to the Transparent PVB Coating through the Zwitterionic Compound Condensation." Coatings. 11(10): 1164.
