Clemson University, USA
Department of Materials Science and Engineering


Invited Talk

Self-Healable Key-and-Lock and Ring-and-Lock Copolymers

The effectiveness of van der Waals (vdW) interactions formulated the new path for the development of copolymers that exhibit self-healing via key-and-lock interactions. Taking advantage of the polarizability of copolymer side groups, the directionality of vdW interactions between neighboring macromolecular segments is enhanced, which upon mechanical damage return to their initial conformations. This process can be altered by polar interactions which, under certain conditions, can be accelerated. Viscoelastic responses controlling macroscopic autonomous multicycle self-healing can be also altered by copolymerized into one macromolecular chain ionic liquid units, thus providing an opportunity for applying electric fields to accelerate self-healing. Taking self-healable concept further, combining key-and-lock interactions with partially crosslinked entities can produce reprocessable covalent adaptive networks (CANs). Favorable inter-chain interactions between aliphatic side groups sandwiched by aromatic rings can form copolymer-dependent ring-and-lock associations driven by pi-polar-pi (π-p-π) interactions which also facilitates self-healing.