High-performance Engineered Conducting Polymer Film towards Antimicrobial/Anticorrosion Applications

The goal of this study was to develop a multifunctional coating material that possessed both electrical and antimicrobial properties.Polypyrrole (PPy) has proved to be transformed into N-halamine after its treatment with chlorine bleach.This PPy based N-halamine was tested to have superior antimicrobial efficacy.Its coating inactivated more than 6 log CFU of both Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli O157:H7 within one min of contact time.The stability of PPy based N-halamine was excellent, maintaining 50% of functional groups after a week storage under fluorescent light.PPy N-halamine coating was successfully synthesized by chlorination of electrodeposited PPy coating on the surface of stainless steel.This PPy N-halamine coating on stainless steel inactivated 6 log CFU of S. aureus within 60s of contact and the antimicrobial activity remained unchanged after a "recharge" cycle.In addition, the PPy N-halamine coating significantly enhanced its the anticorrosion functionality by anodically shifting the corrosion potential.This method of preparing antimicrobial/anticorrosion coating is facile, green and highly effective.The produced PPy N-halamine showed great potential to be applied as multifunctional coating for protecting steels in harsh environments.