While living systems spontaneously heal injuries, most man made materials cannot recover from damage. Incorporating self-healing properties into synthetic polymers could significantly extend product lifetime, safety, and applications. Most reported approaches to incorporate healing into synthetic materials, however, require external stimuli such as chemical additives, heat, and light exposure. Although dynamic bonds have been explored, particularly using a hydrogen bond motif, analogous systems have not been fully investigated for aqueous environments. To address this, hosts and guests that dynamically associate in water have been investigated to build aqueous self-healing materials. The association values for various host/guest complexes were probed using Simultaneous Multiple Sample Light Scattering (SMSLS), a technique that measures the size of aggregates via light scattering while varying concentration and other environmental factors. These studies have elucidated some of the promise, and some of the limitations, of self-assembly in aqueous environments.

Investigation of self-assembly of supramolecular host/guest polymer complexes in water utilizing simultaneous multiple sample lights scattering (SMSLS)

255th National Meeting (2018)

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