Smart coatings

BP Magazine (March 31) -- Ground-breaking research is underway at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a partner in the BP International Centre for Advanced Materials (BP-ICAM), into the potential of smart autonomous coatings that would enable engineers in the energy industry to see cracks in the coatings applied to structures, equipment, pipelines and tank walls and signal before overall coating failure occurs. The secret of these smart coatings is in the damage itself. Nancy Sottos, principal investigator at Illinois, explains what the team has been doing. “Our team embedded microcapsules, containing an indicating agent in their core, in the polymer coating,” Sottos says. “We then scratched the coating to damage it, causing the capsules to rupture, release their core contents and trigger the damage-indicating reaction in the form of a bright red colour change or, for use in dark environments such as inside tanks, fluorescence visible under ultraviolet light.”