Coatings World - March 2014

Shanghai, they are 135 meters high and have an outreach of 24 containers wide, with a lifting height of 50 meters.

Hempel worked closely with Europe Container Terminals (ECT) and ZPMC on this project. ECT is one of the leading container terminal operators in Europe; it handles a vast majority of all the containers passing through the port of Rotterdam. ZPMC is one of the largest equipment manufacturing companies. Their main products include large-scale container machinery and bulk cargo handling machines, offshore heavy-duty products, heavy-duty steel structures, energy-conservative and environmentally-friendly equipment and relative accessories.

Alvin Wang, Coating Engineer - TSD
and Team Leader in ZPMC Changxing
Base commented: “Hempel offered
the perfect paint system that can en-
sure the best anticorrosion property for
the cranes. We have a coating engineer
especially for the project, involved in all
the painting inspections and all the week-
ly meetings.” Arnoud den Braber Hempel
Group Business Development Manager -
Europe added, “We are delighted to be in-
volved in such an impressive and exciting
project, working closely with ECT and
ZPMC. This is a good example of how
effective teamwork and cooperation can
result in a great partnership.”

Researchers Develop Anti-
Reflective Self-Cleaning
Coating Incorporating TiO2
Nanocrystals

A newly-developed coating could enable buildings to have antireflective self-cleaning windows and could increase the efficiency of solar cells.

Details of the coatings, which were de-
veloped by researchers at the University
of Cambridge, were recently outlined in
the journal “Nano Letters.”
Antireflective coatings need to refract
as little light as possible in order to be
effective, but it is extremely difficult to
produce them as a single layer. Over the
past decade, researchers have developed
distributed coatings, which resolve this
by mimicking the structure of moth eyes.
The antireflective properties of moth
eyes come not from a single layer, but
from a hexagonal pattern of tiny bumps.
The spaces between these bumps are so
small that incoming beams of light see the
eye’s surface as a single layer, essentially
removing the interface between the air
and the surface, allowing moths to see at
night and be less visible to predators.

The problem with synthetic versions of moth eye coatings is that the tiny spaces which make the coating antireflective in the first place can very quickly become clogged with dirt, which causes the antireflective effect to be lost.

Professor Ulli Steiner and colleagues from the Cavendish Laboratory have developed a new coating which is both antireflective and self-cleaning. In order to develop it, Professor Steiner and his