Antifouling Silicones Based on Surface-modifying Additive Amphiphiles

Surface modifying additives (SMAs), which may be readily blended into silicones to improve anti-fouling behavior, must have excellent surface migration potential and must not leach into the aqueous environment. In this work, we evaluated the efficacy of a series of poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO)-based SMA amphiphiles which varied in terms of crosslinkability, siloxane tether length (m) and diblock versus triblock architectures. Specifically, crosslinkable, diblock PEO-silane amphiphiles with two oligodimethylsiloxane (ODMS) tether lengths [(EtO)Si-(CH)-ODMS -PEO, = 13 and 30] were compared to analogous non-crosslinkable, diblock (H-Si-ODMS -PEO) and triblock (PEO-ODMS -PEO) SMAs. Prior to water conditioning, while all modified silicone coatings exhibited a high degree of water-driven surface restructuring, that prepared with the non-crosslinkable diblock SMA ( = 13) was the most hydrophilic. After conditioning, all modified silicone coatings were similarly hydrophilic and remained highly protein resistant, with the exception of PEO-ODMS -PEO. Notably, despite twice the PEO content, triblock SMAs were not superior to diblock SMAs. For diblock SMAs, it was shown that water uptake and leaching were also similar whether or not the SMA was crosslinkable.