LAUSR

Abstract Over the last decade, polydopamine (PDA) has attracted significant attention due to its material-independent coating ability, process simplicity, and its powerful capabilities for ad-layer formation. However, its long coating time (24 h) has limited its application in industrial scale. To address this issue, oxidants such as (NH4)2S2O8, CuSO4, and NaIO4 were introduced to enhance the coating kinetically. Although NaIO4, among all the oxidants, was reported as the most efficient one, its high stoichiometric ratio of 2 between the oxidant and dopamine makes it costly and less attractive. Here, KMnO4 is introduced as a new water-soluble oxidant which can substantially reduce the PDA coating to few minutes in a single reaction process with a chance to adjust its thickness without losing PDA intrinsic modification capability. At a KMnO4/dopamine ratio of 0.4, a coating speed of 750 nm/h was achieved, which is 25 times higher than that of NaIO4 at similar oxidant/dopamine ratio. The KMnO4-assisted PDA coating was utilized to introduce an efficient and inexpensive method to convert glass materials to surfaces with durable UV shielding property. Finally, the reducibility and ad-layer formation ability of PDA layer were used to develop silver, copper, and ZIF8 composite PDA layer to adjust the UV protection level.