Self-Healing Polyurethane Elastomer Based On Crosslinked-Linear Interpenetrating Structure: Preparation, Properties, And Applications

Despite tremendous advances in the preparation of self-healing flexible strain sensor devices, it remains a great challenge to large-area synthesis, relatively high mechanical strength, and sensitive sensing properties into one self-healing materials system, which have received increasing interests because of their many potential applications. Herein, the design and synthesis of a crosslinked-linear interpenetrating structure polymer containing disulfide and hydrogen bonds is reported to address this conundrum. The resulting self-healable polymer is highly stretchable (up to 551.7%) with a high tensile strength (4.14 MPa) and excellent healing efficiency of similar to 90% at mild temperature without using any external reagents. Furthermore, a novel method for fabricating flexible sensor is also proposed to endow the resulted sensor with large-area (20 cm x 12 cm), low cost, and outstanding sensitivity to strain, which makes it very suitable for human motion monitoring applications. This work will provide afflatus on future design, fabrication, and application of self-healing flexible strain sensor devices.