Traditional synthetic polymer materials often undergo macroscopic damages on countering several adventitious environmental stimuli that lead them to catastrophic failure. As a potential alternative to improve the longevity of synthetic polymer materials, self-healing is one of the on-demand strategies that has been effectively exploited to mitigate the concerns. In 2013, the World Economic Forum and Global Agenda Council announced the top 10 emerging technologies; “Self-healing materials” was one of them. Since its inception, the ‘click chemistry’ concept is widely exploited to design numerous advanced materials having interesting structural and functional properties (e.g., self-healing, shape-memory, etc.). The ‘click chemistry’ has become a ubiquitous tool, due to its high modularity and orthogonality, to prepare diverse polymer materials. Although the original definition of Sharpless is contradicted, the ‘click’ reactions that are reversibly exchangeable (under certain stimulus) have gained significant interest in developing recyclable/healable thermosets.1 With a motive to develop polymer materials that can find promising applications in specialty coatings, paints, adhesives, etc., herein, the investigations centralize on the execution of fast and exchangeable ‘click-unclick’ approaches to develop self-healing polymethacrylates associated with a few additional characteristics viz., recyclability, shape-memory, fluorescence, etc. via controlled polymerization procedures. The dynamic feature of different ‘click’ crosslinked polymers enabled the healing of microcracks generated in the polymer, exemplified in the present perspective.2, 3

Tailor-made self-healable polymers using exchangeable ‘click chemistry’

ACS Fall 2021

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