Fluor-silane modified nano-calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) as a hydrophobic coating for the conservation of sandstone via bio-inspired design

Abstract

Ancient cultural relics built of red sandstone have high historical value. However, due to the acceleration of the industrialization process of human civilization, increasingly frequent acid rain has caused irreversible damage to the surface of red sandstone artifacts. In this research, a fluor-silane modified nano-calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) was prepared as a biomimetic hydrophobic coating for the conservation of red sandstone inspired by the lotus leaf effect. Characterizations and immersion tests were carried out to assess the protective properties of the coating. XRD, FT-IR, TEM and SEM were combined to characterize the morphology of the coating. In addition, the water contact angle was measured before and after immersion in the simulated acid rain. The results indicate that this kind of hydrophobic nano-CaCO₃ coating effectively protected the sandstone from the deleterious effects of acid rain.

Keywords

Red sandstone / Nano CaCO₃ / Acid rain corrosion / Hydrophobicity

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ye Wang: Writing - original draft, Methodology, Investigation, Conceptualization. Wenxin Xiao: Investigation. Danqian Wang: Visualization, Supervision. Jingfeng Wang: Supervision, Conceptualization.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2021YFB3701100), the Natural Science Foundation Commission of China (Grant No. U20A20234 and 51874062), Chongqing Foundation and Advanced Research Project (Grant No. cstc2019jcyj-zdxmX0010), the Science and Technology Major Project of Shanxi Province (No. 20191102008).

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