Abstract
Self-healing materials are highly desirable because they allow products to maintain their performance. Typical stimuli used for self-healing are heat and light, despite being unsuitable for materials used in certain products as heat can damage other components, and light cannot reach materials located within a product or device. To address these issues, here we show a gas-plastic elastomer with an ionically crosslinked silicone network that quickly self-heals damage in the presence of CO2 gas at normal pressures and room temperature. While a strong elastomer generally exhibits slow self-healing properties, CO2 effectively softened ionic crosslinks in the proposed elastomer, and network rearrangement was promoted. Consequently, self-healing was dramatically accelerated by ~10-fold. Moreover, self-healing was achieved even at −20 °C in the presence of CO2 and the original mechanical strength was quickly re-established during the exchange of CO2 with air.
Highlights
Self-healing materials are highly desirable because they allow products to maintain their performance
The ionically crosslinked poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) elastomer described in this paper exhibited high strength (~3.5 MPa) in air, though the rearrangement of the network was dramatically accelerated by CO2 gas, which effectively softens the material’s crosslinking sites, such as the ionic aggregates (Fig. 1a, c)
The original mechanical strength was quickly re-established in the exchange of CO2 with air (Fig. 2b); i.e., the proposed material is the gas-plastic elastomer, which makes it useful in the development of self-healing materials because the gas is able to permeate components inside the product, and the exposure of most products to CO2 gas would not result in damage to other components
Summary
Self-healing materials are highly desirable because they allow products to maintain their performance. Typical stimuli used for self-healing are heat and light, despite being unsuitable for materials used in certain products as heat can damage other components, and light cannot reach materials located within a product or device To address these issues, here we show a gas-plastic elastomer with an ionically crosslinked silicone network that quickly selfheals damage in the presence of CO2 gas at normal pressures and room temperature. The ionically crosslinked poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) elastomer described in this paper exhibited high strength (~3.5 MPa) in air, though the rearrangement of the network was dramatically accelerated by CO2 gas, which effectively softens the material’s crosslinking sites, such as the ionic aggregates (Fig. 1a, c) This results in rapid self-healing in CO2 gas atmosphere at normal pressures (~0.1 MPa) (Fig. 1d). Our gas-plastic elastomer is based on this conceptual design
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