Vascular smooth muscle-inspired architecture enables soft yet tough self-healing materials for durable capacitive strain-sensor

FuYao Sun, LongFei Liu, Tong Liu, XueBin Wang, Qi Qi, ZuSheng Hang, Kai Chen, JianHua Xu () and JiaJun Fu ()
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FuYao Sun: Nanjing University of Science and Technology
LongFei Liu: Nanjing University of Science and Technology
Tong Liu: Nanjing University of Science and Technology
XueBin Wang: Nanjing University of Science and Technology
Qi Qi: Nanjing University of Science and Technology
ZuSheng Hang: Nanjing Institute of Technology
Kai Chen: Nanjing University of Science and Technology
JianHua Xu: Nanjing University of Science and Technology
JiaJun Fu: Nanjing University of Science and Technology

Nature Communications, 2023, vol. 14, issue 1, 1-12

Abstract: Abstract Catastrophically mechanical failure of soft self-healing materials is unavoidable due to their inherently poor resistance to crack propagation. Here, with a model system, i.e., soft self-healing polyurea, we present a biomimetic strategy of surpassing trade-off between soft self-healing and high fracture toughness, enabling the conversion of soft and weak into soft yet tough self-healing material. Such an achievement is inspired by vascular smooth muscles, where core-shell structured Galinstan micro-droplets are introduced through molecularly interfacial metal-coordinated assembly, resulting in an increased crack-resistant strain and fracture toughness of 12.2 and 34.9 times without sacrificing softness. The obtained fracture toughness is up to 111.16 ± 8.76 kJ/m2, even higher than that of Al and Zn alloys. Moreover, the resultant composite delivers fast self-healing kinetics (1 min) upon local near-infrared irradiation, and possesses ultra-high dielectric constants (~14.57), thus being able to be fabricated into sensitive and self-healing capacitive strain-sensors tolerant towards cracks potentially evolved in service.

Date: 2023
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-35810-y

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