Chemical Resistant Improvement of Natural Rubber and Nitrile Gloves by Coating with Hydrophobic Film

In this paper, we report innovative gloves that are coated with hydrophobic film such that the outer surface of the gloves is hydrophobic. A coating precursor containing polymethyl hydrogensiloxane, silica nanoparticle, semifluorinated silane and Pt-catalyst was painted onto the gloves. The coated gloves were kept at room temperature for 12 h to make the film dry, and then tested for their chemical resistance with 10 M NaOH, conc. HCl, conc. H2SO4 and conc. HNO3 solutions, as well as the standard buffered solutions (pH = 1, 4, 10, and 12) at 25oC by dropping the chemicals onto the coated gloves. It was found that the nitrile gloves had similar contact angles to the latex gloves when tested with the standard buffered solutions while the nitrile gloves had higher contact angles compared to the latex gloves when tested with different aqueous-based hazardous chemicals. The nitrile gloves coated with the hydrophobic film showed high acid droplet contact angle, leaving behind much lesser damage from hazardous chemicals.