Frustrated polymers heal themselves

Abstract

Frustrated Lewis pairs (FLPs) created a buzz in the chemistry community a decade ago when they were introduced as a metal-free catalytic system. A research team in Scotland has now taken the concept into unexplored territory by incorporating FLPs into polymers for the first time. Among other attributes, the reactive FLPs provide a new strategy for forming dynamic cross-linked networks that give polymer gels self-healing properties. “This is an exciting development and a very clever application of the notion of FLPs to access materials with unique properties and characteristics,” comments Douglas W. Stephan of the University of Toronto, who wasn’t involved in the new work. Stephan and coworkers introduced the FLP idea in 2006, discovering that when an electron-rich Lewis base attempts to share a spare pair of electrons with an electron-deficient Lewis acid and when the base and acid are dressed with bulky substituent groups or are separated by