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Abstract
The increasing needs for environmental friendly antifouling coatings have led to investigation of new alternatives for replacing copper and TBT-based paints. In this study, results are presented from larval settlement assays of the barnacle Amphibalanus (= Balanus) amphitrite on planar, interdigitated electrodes (IDE), having 8 or 25 μm of inter-electrode spacing, upon the application of pulsed electric fields (PEF). Using pulses of 100 ms in duration, 200 Hz in frequency and 10 V in pulse amplitude, barnacle settlement below 5% was observed, while similar IDE surfaces without pulse application had an average of 40% settlement. The spacing between the electrodes did not affect cyprid settlement. Assays with lower PEF amplitudes did not show significant settlement inhibition. On the basis of the settlement assays, the calculated minimum energy requirement to inhibit barnacle settlement is 2.8 W h m−2.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) for providing the funding for this project under the contract N0014-03-1-0647. We also thank Dr Dean Tompkins and Dr Isabel Tejedor (University of Wisconsin) for their useful comments, undergraduate research assistant Richard Niemer for his help on the experimental setup, and Gary Dickinson (Duke University Marine Lab) for his editorial comments.