Polymeric materials with integrated functionalities are required to match their ever-expanding practical applications, but there is always a trade-off between complex material performances and synthetic simplification. Given the intrinsical photo-responsiveness of disulfide bonds, a visible-light polymerization strategy is demonstrated to transform a natural small-molecule disulfide, thioctic acid, into a high- performance poly(disulfides) network without any external additives, which combines optical transparency, mechanical stretchability and toughness, ambient self-healing ability, and especially strong adhesive ability to different surfaces. Meanwhile, we also disclose a bionic strategy by combining natural thioctic acid and mussel-inspired iron-catechol complexes to enable ultrastrong adhesive materials that can be used underwater and simultaneously exhibit unprecedentedly high adhesion strength on diversified surfaces. Moreover, the dynamic covalent poly(disulfides) network also endows the resulting materials reconfigurability, thus enabling the multiple reusability for a range of applications, such as on-demand adhesion, surface modification, wearable devices and biodegradable materials.

Supramolecular dynamic polymer adhesives derived from a natural small molecule

ACS Spring 2022

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.