Antireflective coatings of chitin nanofibers on glass fabricated through electric field deposition

Due to their wide variety of practical applications, antireflective coatings have been studied intensively. In this paper, we developed a novel approach to fabricate antireflective coatings on glass substrate by using charged chitin nanofibers (ChNFs) and electric field deposition. The ChNFs were obtained via ultrasonic treatment of the modified chitin through partial deacetylation, esterification and esterification followed partial deacetylation (dual modification), respectively. The ChNF coatings prepared by applying electric field deposition and using aqueous dispersions of the dual modified ChNFs had antireflective capacity. The effects of electric field intensity, electric field application time and ChNF dispersion concentration on antireflective capacity of the ChNF coatings were studied. The coating obtained by applying 55 V electric field for 5 min and using the dispersion of the dual modified ChNFs with concentration of 0.05 wt% yielded increase in transmittance of a glass substrate (similar to 2.4% at wavelength of 550 nm). The results of this study demonstrate that electric field deposition is a high efficiency and low cost approach to prepare antireflective coatings on large size and nonplanar substrates with charged nanofibers.