Water- and Heat-Induced Crack-Healing of UCST-Type Poly(acrylamide-co-acrylonitrile) with Intrinsic Controllability and Reversibility AITranslate

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DOI：https://doi.org/10.1021/acsapm.2c00453

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Autonomic crack-healing technology has become a common option for reconstructing polymer networks against mechanical degradation, structure mismatch, material fatigue, and even performance failure, but how to precisely and easily trigger this healing process on the crack interfaces is still a huge challenge. Here, we first found an autonomic physicochemical crack-healing behavior featuring intrinsic controllability and reversibility, based on nonionic poly(acrylamide-co-acrylonitrile) [P(AAm-co-AN)] with an upper critical solution temperature (UCST). Under the fast synergistic action between extrinsic deionized water and heat, the scratched P(AAm-co-AN) layer fully returned to the original flat form and was reworked at least five times. Meanwhile, their corresponding optical and mechanical performances also recovered almost 100%. In particular, the intrinsic thermoresponsiveness of P(AAm-co-AN) takes a leading role in this crack-healing process, in which both interchain transition and topological entanglement come into play. It provides a facile, rapid, precise, green, and autonomic crack-healing strategy for improving polymer durability.