Self-healing of reversibly cross-linked thermoplastic vulcanizates

To improve the sustainability, reliability and lifetime of polymer-based materials, the researchers show great passion to fabricate polymers with self-healing capacity. However, there are few reports about the self-healing thermoplastic vulcanizates (TPVs), which is ascribed to the fact that the sea-island structure of general TPVs hinders the introduction of self-healing property. In this work, carboxylic carbon nanotubes (S-CNTs) were introduced into polylactide (PLA)/epoxidized natural rubber (ENR) TPV, in which the reconstruction of dynamic reversible bonds and the co-continuous structure of the TPV were utilized to design a PLA/ENR/S-CNTs TPV with excellent self-healing properties and great mechanical strength. The fabricated TPV exhibited the highest self-healing efficiency of 99.7%, while the maximum tensile strength of TPV could exceed 7 MPa. We hope that the experience of this work can provide a basis for more research in self-healing TPV field.