Aerospace and Marine Environments as Design Spaces for Contamination-Mitigating Polymeric Coatings

Aerospace and marine environments are two of the most challenging arenas for durable coatings. This introductory chapter for the Advances in Polymer Science volume “Contamination-Mitigating Polymeric Coatings for Extreme Environments” gives an overview of materials and test method advances pertaining to ice and insect mitigation for aerospace coatings and biofouling mitigation for marine coatings. Each of these topics is then discussed in greater detail by subject matter experts in the following chapters. A common challenge in these arenas is the cost, complexity, and limited availability of field measurements, necessitating the need for laboratory-scale testing and the setting of benchmarks. An example is provided showing the complexity of setting a benchmark for maximum ice adhesion strength to anti-contamination coatings allowing passive ice removal by wind or vibration. Modeling ice as a cantilever beam on a coating surface in a wind stream indicates that the benchmark value is dependent on the assumed shape of the ice that needs to be removed.