Biofouling is a serious concern and can cause health risks and financial burdens in many settings such as maritime structures, medical devices, and water treatment plants. Many technologies employing toxic biocides, antifouling toxic coatings, and chlorine have been established to prevent or impede biofouling. However, their applications are limited due to environmental and health concerns regarding biocides and coating materials. To overcome this, novel antifouling coatings employing ecofriendly, nontoxic nanomaterials and appreciable antimicrobial and antibiofilm properties have been developed. Due to intrinsic antimicrobial properties, these antifouling nanocoatings have been proven to be effective against several water-borne microorganisms. Various nanostructures of metals (silver, copper, and gold), metal oxides (zinc oxide, titanium oxide, copper oxide, and cerium oxide), carbon (graphene and carbon nanotubes), and metal nanocomposites inhibit the biocorrosion and biofilm formation caused by bacteria. Besides, antifouling technology developed based on nanocontainers releases key active substances that promote selfcleaning, anticorrosion, and antibiofilm properties. This review provides a comprehensive overview of nanotechnology-enabled antifouling agents developed to combat micro-and macrofouling phenomena. Moreover, the recent progress in the applications of antifouling coatings in industrial sectors such as marine (ships), water-treatment plants, and medical devices is elaborated with relevant examples. The mechanistic insights into the inhibitory action of bacterial cell growth and biofilm formation by antifouling nanocoatings are presented. The challenges associated with developing antifouling nanoproducts, their practical limitations, and prospects are also discussed.

Reducing carbon footprints and adopting green energy sources is the need of modern time. Green sources of energy need to find preference over traditional sources. Unconventional sources of energy like solar, wind are alternatives of traditional energy sources. Lack of awareness, high initial investment and lack of government incentive are few challenges in adoption of green sources of energy in housing sector, especially in developing economies. Construction, design and aesthetics of traditional residential building have a significant effect on energy consumption and environment. Town planners, private housing developers and individual house owners have to become aware and adopt the non-traditional sources of energy like solar energy for meeting their daily need of energy. An energy sustainable house has minimum dependency on traditional sources of energy like coal based thermal power plants. For moving a step closer to energy sustainable building, in this research paper authors have studied the design, energy consumption and transformation of energy dependencies on roof top solar plant of a residential building by situation actor process & learning action performance (SAP-LAP) methodology. Further authors tried to validate the observations and findings of study by energy balance analysis of the same residential building by Autodesk Revit software. Studying the economical aspect of current case authors observed that the case house got 60% saving in monthly electricity bill after installing rooftop solar power plant and payback period of total investment on solar power plant is 6.5 to 7 years only.

No abstract

No abstract