Nanotechnology in everyday life

Thirty years ago, the phrase "nanotechnology in everyday life" would probably have sounded like a line from a sci-fi film, or at best someone's bold guess. Today, though, nanotechnology is available to everyone, and protective coatings created this way do good service every day, considerably easing many people's lives and protecting their property.

The whole point is that protective coatings built on nanotechnology have unique properties, among them forming a reliable polymer film with dirt-repelling and water-repelling effects. But the biggest advantage of these protective nanocoatings is how broadly they can be applied to different kinds of materials, right down to wood and fabric. At first, the main areas of application were medicine, military and space manufacturing, but over time their use has expanded all the way to everyday household needs. If we're talking about exactly where such protective coatings can be used around the house, the short answer is practically everywhere. To understand which home interior items and personal belongings can be treated with protective nanocoatings, let's loosely group them by the material they're made from.

Glass items — windows, mirrors, glass canopies and facades, shower enclosures with glass walls, glass inserts in interior doors, glass cabinet doors, glass partitions and so on — hold onto protective coatings well, since these coatings contain no wax, no silicone, nor any other component that would be visible on a transparent glass surface (and besides, those components don't last long, unlike a layer formed by nanoparticles). Ceramic items — sinks, tiles, bathtubs, toilets and so on — are subjected more than most to the "trials" of water and chemically aggressive cleaning agents, and limescale deposits most often build up on ceramic surfaces. It's worth noting that nanotechnology-based protective coatings not only add a certain shine to ceramic surfaces, but also prevent limescale build-up by 90%, something no other protective coating can achieve.

Among interior items, wooden pieces that need particular care and skilled surface protection are quite common. Nanocoatings provide exactly this kind of protection without in any way affecting the wood's ability to "breathe," while reliably shielding it from the damaging effects of moisture. One of the advantages that sets such coatings apart from traditional products is that they're entirely neutral in how they visually change the treated surface, which cannot be said of waxes, varnishes and other substances.

Natural stone (marble, granite and other types) also requires no less specific care, which protective coatings built on nanotechnology are able to provide. Everyone knows how hard it is to get, say, a red wine or grease stain out of a marble countertop, and many special products fail at the task of creating a reliable barrier against such staining. Protective coatings with nanoparticles form a polymer layer built from micron-sized particles bonded together by glass-like links. No substance is able to penetrate such a barrier. Coatings of this type are also used to treat leather and textiles to give them hydrophobic and dirt-repelling properties, while preserving the materials' moisture-wicking ability, which matters a great deal for clothing. Such protective coatings can be applied to any type of material, whether the finest silk or fairly dense cotton fabric. Clothing treated this way is unafraid of rain or an accidentally spilled cup of coffee or glass of wine. At the same time, its appearance stays unchanged, since protective coatings made of nanoparticles don't affect its colour, and caring for it becomes much simpler and easier, as indeed it does for any other item whose surface has been treated with such a product.