Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is closely related to people's lives, but excess UV exposure has led to a series of problems. UV protection technology plays a vital role in our life. The most commonly adopted UV protection technology is to use UV-absorbing materials to make protective coatings, including sunscreen cream for human skin and sunscreen coating for materials. Conventional organic UV-protective coatings have low stability and are sensitive to heat, while inorganic UV-protective coating with highly efficient UV-protective performance usually need high processing temperatures and exhibit low transparency. Here, we report a Ti-PEG-Si cross-linked inorganic-organic hybrid material, which exhibits good UV-absorbing performance. By using these UV-absorbing materials, an efficient transparent UV-absorbing coating could be easily prepared at room temperature (298 K). The UV-absorbing coating is mainly composed of titanium and silicon connected by PEG200. PEG200 as a cross-linker can improve the UV-absorption performance of the coating and increase its visible light transmittance. At the same time, the existence of PEG200 can effectively increase the stability and elasticity of the coating and maintain its mechanical properties after UV irradiation. Furthermore, the coating could maintain highly UV-protective performance and could be transparent even after thermal treatment at high temperature (973 K). From this point of view, the hybrid materials have considerable application potential in next-generation UV protective coatings, especially with their utilization in heat-sensitive substrates or under high-temperature conditions.
Keywords: UV-blocking materials; UV-protective coating; hybrid oligomer; hydrolysis-resistant; titanium; transparent film.