The oxygen barrier is a well sought-after property for all the applications where oxygen plays a detrimental role. For example, excellent barrier properties are required for packaging materials intended for many different foods (e.g. fatty food), to avoid negative reactions (e.g. oxidation) that would affect the final shelf life.
Plastics lack inherent high oxygen barrier performance, which can instead arise after coating deposition.
In my research, I deal with the development of high oxygen barrier coatings obtained from organic molecules (both oil-based and biopolymers) combined with an inorganic counterpart by means of sol-gel chemistry and synthesis routes. The development of such hybrid materials led to a new generation of coatings that are currently marketed under the OXAQUA® brand name.
