Corrosion-Responsive Self-Healing Coatings.

Organic coatings are one of the most popular and powerful strategies for protecting metals against corrosion. They can be applied to in different ways, such as by dipping, spraying, electrophoresis, casting, painting, or flow coating. They offer great flexibility of material designs and cost effectiveness. Moreover, since about 20 years self-healing has evolved as a new research topic for protective organic coatings. Responsive materials play a crucial role in this new research field. However, for a really targeted development of high performance self-healing coatings for corrosion protection, it is not sufficient just to focus on smart responsive materials and suitable active agents for self-healing. A better understanding of how coatings can react on different stimuli induced by corrosion, how these stimuli can spread in the coating and how the released agents can reach the corroding defect is also of high importance. Such knowledge would allow to design coatings which are optimised for specific applications. Herein, the requirements and possibilities from the corrosion and synthesis perspectives for designing materials for preparing self-healing coatings for corrosion protection are discussed. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.