Abstract
In the modern world, expanding the useful lifespan of materials is becoming highly desirable. Thus, self-healing and self-repairing materials should become valuable commodities. To create self-healing materials, our research focuses on the formation of supramolecular materials through host-guest interactions, which is a powerful method to create nonconventional materials. We employ CD and aliphatic groups as host and guest molecules, respectively, to construct supramolecular self-healing materials. Host-guest interactions have unique features due to selective complementary interactions, which have easily tuned material strength and self-healing efficiencies. Supramolecular materials formed by host-guest interactions recover to the initial strength even after the materials were cut in half, and then rejoined.
Moreover, we report the formation of supramolecular hydrogels and their redox-responsive and self-healing properties due to host-guest interactions. Redox stimuli induce a sol-gel phase transition in the supramolecular hydrogel and can control self-healing properties such as re-adhesion between cut surfaces.
