Highly Flexible, Tough, and Self Healing Supramolecular Polymeric Materials Using Host Guest Interaction.
Flexible, tough, and self healable polymeric materials are promising to be a solution to the energy problem by substituting for conventional heavy materials. A fusion of supramolecular chemistry and polymer chemistry is a powerful method to create such intelligent materials. Here, a supramolecular polymeric material using multipoint molecular recognition between cyclodextrin (CD) and hydrophobic guest molecules at polymer side chain is reported. A transparent, flexible, and tough hydrogel (host guest gel) is formed by a simple preparation procedure. The host guest gel shows self healing property in both wet state and dry state due to reversible nature of host guest interaction. The practical utility of the host guest gel as a scratch curable coating is demonstrated.
Macromolecular rapid communications