Study of the anti-fouling polymer sheet which used biomimetics technique

It has long been known that snail shells have an excellent anti-fouling function, as it is said that there are no dirty snails. The snails encountered during the baiu rainy season in Japan always have clean, shining shells. These shells are known to have convex-concave nanoscale structures on their surface (roughness on the order of approximately 200 nm) that promote the formation of a film of water on the shell surface, creating an ultra-hydrophilic nanoscale structure that repels oils and stains ^[1]. Creating such an ultra-hydrophilic nanoscale structure on a polymer surface should allow us to produce an antifouling polymer sheet. Additionally, producing a tube from a polymer film with this nanoscale structure should make it possible to create a tube with high antifouling properties. The field of technologies based on imitating properties and structures observed in living organisms in nature is called biomimetics^[2]. This paper reports on the development of antifouling sheets and tubes with antifouling functions fabricated using the above technologies. The first step was creating a mold with an artificial snail shell structure using ZrO₂ nanoparticles [3], whose patterns were then transferred to polymer with nanoimprint technology ^[4-5]. These antifouling sheets and tubes are expected to see wide use for medical applications.