Organic-inorganic hybrid coatings: synthesis, deposition and applications

Organic-inorganic hybrid materials (i.e., materials deriving from the combination of organic and inorganic building blocks) have attracted, in the last decades, a sharply increasing interest, from both the scientific and the technological point of view. The manifold and exciting properties of functional organic-inorganic hybrid materials have to be traced back to the intimate merging, often mediated by the formation of strong chemical bonds, between inorganic and organic building blocks, in which i) chemical nature, ii) structure iii) molar ratios and iv) mutual arrangement of the building blocks do remarkably affect the final properties of the resulting materials. Particular appealing is the extension of this concept to the preparation of coatings, either to provide a protective function for the underlying material or to endow it with enhanced functional properties. The chapter will be focused on recent advances in the field of organic-inorganic hybrid coatings, encompassing mainly two broad typologies:  hybrid materials deriving from the embedding of different kinds of inorganic building blocks or components into a polymer matrix;  hybrid materials deriving from the sol-gel process of suitably functionalized organically-modified silane (ORMOCER, ORMOSIL etc.) In particular, the chapter will be focused i) on general synthetic approaches to afford functional organic-inorganic hybrid materials, ii) on deposition approaches to produce the coatings, and iii) on their functional properties (e.g., scratch-resistant, hydrophobic, antistatic etc.) and manifold applications.