This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is aimed at demonstrating commercial viability for a new self-healing corrosion-protection system. Corrosion significantly impacts both the costs and availability of commercial aircraft, costing tens of billions of dollars annually. The proposed Self-Healing Anti-Corrosion Coating (SHAC) is capable of repeatable repair and sustained protection of aluminum components. The SHAC proposed is unique from the current state of the art in that it is innately, at the molecular level, self-healing; it does not require catalysts/healing-agents or any form of external input. The research proposed here focuses on reducing the cost of the system in terms of both raw material and eventual industrial scale manufacture, as well as improving its performance and reducing its environmental impact. To reduce material costs, GK will employ inexpensive commodity monomers that nonetheless possess the desired functionality to yield self-healing properties, as well as switch to a macromolecular architecture that is compatible with established industrial scale synthesis and processing. To improve mechanical and barrier performance, we will add light crosslinking and nano-fillers. These goals will be combined in a definitive prototype demonstration.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project will be derived from a substantial reduction of the lifecycle cost of airframes in the commercial and military aviation industry, both by increasing the lifetime by preventing corrosion, and by removing the large maintenance costs associated with corrosion prevention and repair. This will broadly improve the economic sustainability and reduce the environmental impact of the aviation industry, which would likely further resulting in efficiency and productivity enhancement across the whole spectrum of travel and freight industries. Economy-wide, about 2% of US GDP ($100 billion/year) is spent to prevent/remediate damage from corrosion. A commercially viable self-healing top-coat technology would dramatically reduce the frequency and costs of corrosion repair and extend product life-cycles, improving the overall efficiency and sustainability of the economy. Successful SHAC demonstration and commercialization will lead to improved safety and lifetime across all elastomeric and composite material applications. In addition, by careful selection of the composition of the different phases, new advanced multifunctional coatings, encapsulants, structural composites, textiles, and and opto-electronic materials will be obtained, all with the performance and lifetime-enhancing self-healing property inherent to our dynamic multiphase design, ultimately resulting in a new game-changing "material by design" paradigm.
GK has successfully completed its goals for Phase I of this award as described in the proposal, and both the RI (UC Irvine) and Sub-contractor (NextGen Aeronautics) delivered as promised in terms of R&D support and application testing, respectively. The following project goals of the original proposal were met: 1) Dramatic cost-reduction via commercial off-the-shelf monomer approach; 2) Property enhancement via amine addition (light chemical crosslinking), di-block/tri-block co-polymer blending (light physical crosslinking), and functional nano-composite dispersion; and 3) Demonstration of the technology in a commercially relevant corrosion-protection coating model. Not mentioned in the proposal but also accomplished was a) the scale up to 300g/batch; b) the demonstration of self-healing (SH) properties as universal, high-nano-loading, exceptionally dispersing binder; c) a dramatic reduction in waste per synthesis cycle; and d) demonstration of non-toxic formulation capability. The studies performed under this award clearly demonstrated the disruptive potential of GK's Dynamic Nanocomposite Self Healing material technology, both as a tool for further understanding of multfunctional, smart, bio-inspired, and material-by-design systems, and as a platform for dramatically lowering product lifecycle and maintenance costs by reducing the effect surface-damage-induced corrosion. Specifically, we showed that affordable self healing coatings can be produced at scale, and can effectively re-form a protective barrier after catastrophic damage that penetrates the coating and permanently deforms the metal underneath.
