Emulsion self-template induced organic-inorganic hybrid Janus nanoparticles towards constructing self-healing self-reporting anticorrosive functional coating

Abstract

An appealing emulsion template-guided interface engineering has emerged for preparation of Janus nanoparticles due to its scalable synthesis procedure and precise adjustability. However, present reports by this strategy synthesizing anisotropic nanoparticles mainly focus on single component, and require an additional oil drop template and subsequent removal. Consequently, the controllable fabrication of hybrid Janus particles (HJPs) containing organic-inorganic components simultaneously in one-pot emulsion still suffers a great challenge. Here, snowman-like, popcorn-like, and mulberry-like HJPs, composed of 3-aminophenol-co-formaldehyde polymer and mesoporous SiO₂, were tailored successfully using a one-pot emulsion self-template induction strategy, and an interface anisotropic assembly mechanism was revealed, elucidating their growth process. Ascribed to abundant mesopores and well-defined composition partitions, as-prepared snowman-like HJPs with adjustable overall sizes and two end sizes can be used as a carrier of color-developing agent and a compatibilizer between linseed oil and waterborne polyurethane to construct self-reporting and self-healing intelligent anticorrosive coating. Generally, our findings not only open up a new direction for the application of HJPs in functional coatings, but also provide guidelines for the emulsion self-template inducing HJPs with precise architecture and innovative function design.