Tough, Photoluminescent, Self-Healing Waterborne Polyurethane Elastomers Resulting from Synergistic Action of Multiple Dynamic Bonds

Citations Over TimeTop 1% of 2023 papers

Abstract

Polymers that integrate multiple functions into one system broaden the application range of materials, but it remains a great challenge to obtain polymer materials with simultaneously high strength, high toughness, and high self-healing rate. In this work, we prepared waterborne polyurethane (WPU) elastomers using Schiff bases containing disulfide and acylhydrazone bonds (PD) as chain extenders. Acylhydrazone forming a hydrogen bond not only acts as a physical cross-linking point, which promotes the microphase separation of polyurethane to increase the thermal stability, tensile strength, and toughness of the elastomer, but also serves as a "clip" to integrate various dynamic bonds together to synergistically reduce the activation energy of the polymer chain movement and endow the molecular chain with faster fluidity. Therefore, WPU-PD exhibits excellent mechanical properties at room temperature, such as a tensile strength and a fracture energy of 25.91 MPa and 121.66 kJ m-2, respectively, and a high self-healing efficiency of 93.7% in a short time under moderate heating conditions. In addition, the photoluminescence property of WPU-PD enables us to track its self-healing process by monitoring change of the fluorescence intensity at the cracks, which helps to avoid the accumulation of cracks and improve the reliability of the elastomer. This self-healing polyurethane has a great potential application value in optical anticounterfeiting, flexible electronics devices, functional automobile protective films, and so on.

Related Papers

• → Increasing the toughness of nylon 12 by the incorporation of functionalized graphene(2010)149 cited
• → Self-healable, recyclable, mechanically tough transparent polysiloxane elastomers based on dynamic microphase separation for flexible sensor(2021)34 cited
• Synthesis and Characterization of Flexible and Rigid Polyurethane Foam(2014)
• → Self‐Healing Elastomers: Autonomous Self‐Healing Elastomers with Unprecedented Adhesion Force (Adv. Funct. Mater. 4/2021)(2021)5 cited
• Synthesis of Polyurethane Acrylate with High Toughness and Its Application(2004)