Antibacterial and Self-Cleaning Coatings for Silicate Ceramics: A Review

The development of advanced materials is increasingly leading to integration of functions into materials and components. This drive in technological innovation is strongly felt in many traditional fields, like textiles or ceramics. Over the last twenty years, the so-called "traditional" ceramics industry for tile production has undergone a profound technological reorganization, both in production technologies and automation of the different production phases, but new products and possible new applications are still needed, thereby opening up new markets. In this paper a critical review of the industrial and scientific effort to obtain antibacterial and selfcleaning coating for ceramic tiles is reported. The main patents and scientific papers in the field are reported as well as some final results obtained by the authors on the evaluation of the durability of photocatalytic coating deposited on industrial ceramic tiles.