Toughening Self-Healing Elastomers with Chain Mobility.

ABSTRACT: Enhancing fracture toughness and self-healing within soft elastomers is crucial to prolonging the operational lifetimes of soft devices. Herein, it is revealed that tuning the polymer chain mobilities of carboxylated-functionalized polyurethane through incorporating plasticizers or thermal treatment can enhance these properties. Self-healing is promoted as polymer chains gain greater mobility toward the broken interface to reassociate their bonds. Raising the temperature from 80 to 120 °C, the recovered work of fracture is increased from 2.86 to 123.7 MJ m^-3. Improved fracture toughness is realized through two effects. First, strong carboxyl hydrogen bonds dissipate large energies when broken. Second, chain mobilities enable the redistribution of localized stress concentrations

SUBMITTER: Tan MWM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11321685 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature