Polymer materials often undergo macroscopic damage due to environmental stimuli that lead to catastrophic failure. As a potential alternative to improve their longevity, self-healing is one strategy that has been effectively utilized to mitigate polymer damage. 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, ‘click chemistry’ has been widely exploited to design advanced materials having interesting structural and functional properties (e.g., self-healing, shape-memory, etc.). ‘Click chemistry’ has become a ubiquitous tool due to its high modularity and orthogonality to prepare diverse polymer materials. Some ‘click’ reactions that are reversible (under specific conditions) have gained significant interest in developing recyclable/healable thermosets.<sup>1,2</sup> To develop polymer materials that have promising applications in specialty coatings, paints, adhesives, etc., this presentation will focus on reversible ‘click-unclick’ approaches (Scheme 1) to develop self-healing polymer materials to obtain characteristics such as, recyclability, shape-memory, etc. via controlled polymerization procedures. The dynamic feature of different ‘click’ crosslinked polymers enabled the healing of microcracks generated in the polymer materials.<sup>3-5</sup>

Self-healable tailor-made polymer materials using reversible 'click chemistry'

ACS Spring 2022

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