Published Paper Details:

Antifouling systems generally refer to dealing with the undesirable accumulation of marine biological organisms on surfaces for e.g. ships hulls, sea-platforms which are in contact with seawater. This natural phenomenon offer a large number of economic problems to the marine industry to deal with. The Traditional approaches utilize metal ions especially copper to prevent such biological contamination but it is proved to harm the environment and the ecosystem. Later the use of tributyltin-based coatings made the conditions worst as it is highly toxic in nature. After the ban on use of tributyltin in antifouling coatings , the emphasis is now on the use of nontoxic and/or ecofriendly natural materials which do not negatively affect the environment. This is a review which focuses on the natural antifouling techniques and the synthetic fouling release coatings which are environmentally benign. A lot of biologically extracted antifouling agents are also studied in this review which exhibits a biomimetic approach. The mechanism of marine biofouling and factors affecting it is also overlooked in this study.