Abstract
Utilization of self-healing chemistry to develop synthetic polymer materials that can heal themselves with restored mechanical performance and functionality is of great interest. Self-healable polymer elastomers with tunable mechanical properties are especially attractive for a variety of applications. Herein, a series of urea functionalized poly(dimethyl siloxane)-based elastomers (U-PDMS-Es) are reported with extremely high stretchability, self-healing mechanical properties, and recoverable gas-separation performance. Tailoring the molecular weights of poly(dimethyl siloxane) or weight ratio of elastic cross-linker offers tunable mechanical properties of the obtained U-PDMS-Es, such as ultimate elongation (from 984% to 5600%), Young's modulus, ultimate tensile strength, toughness, and elastic recovery. The U-PDMS-Es can serve as excellent acoustic and vibration damping materials over a broad range of temperature (over 100 °C). The strain-dependent elastic recovery behavior of U-PDMS-Es is also studied. After mechanical damage, the U-PDMS-Es can be healed in 120 min at ambient temperature or in 20 min at 40 °C with completely restored mechanical performance. The U-PDMS-Es are also demonstrated to exhibit recoverable gas-separation functionality with retained permeability/selectivity after being damaged.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 1800741 |
| Journal | Advanced Functional Materials |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue number | 22 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 30 2018 |
Funding
P.-F.C. and B.L. contributed equally to this work. This study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Materials Sciences and Engineering Division. B.L. and T.H. acknowledges financial support for the gas-separation analysis by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Fossil Energy, Carbon Capture Program, and by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Technology Innovation Program using technology transfer license royalties. K.X. acknowledges financial support from NSF Polymer program (DMR-1408811). J.T. and K.D.V. would like to acknowledge the University of Tennessee for financial support of this work (start-up grant). A portion of this research was conducted at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, which is a DOE Office of Science User Facility. The United States Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States Government purposes. The Department of Energy will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan (http://energy. gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Keywords
- gas separation
- hydrogen bonding
- polymeric elastomers
- self-healing
- tunable mechanical properties