There has recently been much interest in developing materials capable of spontaneous self-healing after damage in order to improve a material's lifetime, safety, and environmental impact.  There has been much success in developing soft, low modulus spontaneously healing materials, but tough and stiff self-healing materials have been less readily synthesized.  Recently, some microphase-separated systems have been proposed which incorporate more favorable mechanical properties and self-healing capabilities into the same material; a thermoplastic elastomer morphology with rigid glassy domains embedded in a soft matrix endows a material with mechanical stiffness and the ability to heal via hydrogen bonding.  Very little is known about the effect that the mechanical properties of the glassy domain have on the mechanical properties of the material as a whole.  Here we report the synthesis and self-healing properties of functionalized poly(ether sulfone)s with grafted side chains capable of hydrogen bonding.  High Tg poly(ether sulfone)s are functionalized with initiators for ATRP via chloromethylation in preparation for controlled polymerization of the hydrogen bonding monomer 5-acetylaminopentyl acrylate.  Synthetic data, mechanical properties, and self-healing data of the resulting materials will be reported.  We expect this research to expand the scope of mechanically robust self-healing materials, and to provide valuable structure-property information about self-healing TPE systems. 

Self-healing properties of functionalized poly(ether sulfone) thermoplastic elastomers

247th National Meeting (2014)

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