Preparation of room-temperature self-healing elastomers with high strength based on multiple dynamic bonds

Abstract

As far as the self-healing elastomers are concerned, there is a contradiction between mechanical strength and self-healing performance because it’s hard to acquire strong intermolecular interaction and flexible segments motion concurrently. How to prepare room-temperature self-healing elastomers with high strength remains an enormous challenge. Herein, we synthesized room-temperature self-healing thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPUs) incorporated with multiple hydrogen bonds, reversible disulfide bonds and coordination bonds simultaneously. The prepared elastomers exhibit a tensile strength of over 16.1 MPa and a fracture strain of 771%, which are robust in comparison to most previous reports. The multiple dynamic bonds endow the elastomers with a high self-healing efficiency (94%) within 24 h at room temperature. The self-healing mechanism was expounded from the perspective of the aggregate structure such as the degree of aggregation, the degree of microphase separation and molecular dynamics. It can be calculated by the dynamic mechanical analysis that the activation energy of the target elastomer is lower than that of samples without dynamic interactions, which is of advantage to self-healing properties.