The advantages are evident, liquids do not get soaked up as quickly, and dirt does not adhere as easily on treated textile fabrics. A spilled liquid lies on top of the textile instead being absorbed. It can therefore be wiped away, leaving almost no trace. Several key questions are posed on the development of fluorinated coatings, among them the relationship between their structure and the resulting properties. In addition, our work is focussed on new building blocks and new application methods.
Further research goes into the reactive coatings in supercritical carbon dioxide.
In another line of work the film formation of Semifluorinated Star Polymers is investigated. These compounds can be easily varied and the chemical structure can be thus correlated to the properties of the final coating. Our aim is to modify surfaces by applying thin water and oil repellant coatings, reacting them with cellulose by classical procedures or in supercritical CO 2 . Further studies are then directed to apply these coatings onto textiles. Using a building block approach, the star polymer can be easily adjusted to fit our specifications, e.g., amount of fluorocarbon terminal groups per star.