Highly transparent, self-healing conductive elastomers enabled by synergistic hydrogen bonding interactions

By Ren’ai Li, Ting Fan, G. Chen, Hujun Xie, Bin Su, M. He. 2020

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract It is attractive, though it is very challenging, to synthesize conductive elastomers with high transparency and self-healing ability, simultaneously with facile and environmentally friendly preparation process. Here we demonstrate the fabrication of highly transparent, self-healing conductive elastomers based on synergistic hydrogen bonding interactions between poly(polymerizable deep eutectic solvent) (poly(PDES)) and phytic acid (PA) molecules. The hybrid network elastomers showed a fast self-healing property (within 2 s) without any other external stimuli and excellent self-healing efficiency (91.5%) within 48 h. The poly(PDES)-PA elastomers were highly transparent (an average transmittance of 93%), intrinsically conductive (an ionic conductivity of 7.8 × 10−4 S cm−1) and stretchable (strains up to 1300%). Furthermore, the abilities of healable & conductive poly(PDES)-PA elastomers to monitor the human activities retained no matter before or after being damaged. We believe this kind of dynamic bond manipulation is a powerful strategy to design and synthesize various transparent, self-healing, conductive elastomers for versatile applications.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2882058a996c6ce91b89610cc71dbc9e1698b411