Self-healing, antibiofouling and anticorrosion properties enabled by designing polymers with dynamic covalent bonds and responsive linkages.

Coating metal structures with a protective material is a popular strategy to prevent their deterioration due to corrosion. However, maintaining the barrier properties of coatings after their mechanical damage is challenging. Herein, we prepared multifunctional coatings with self-healing ability to conserve their anticorrosion performance after damage.

Corrosion-Responsive Self-Healing Coatings.

Organic coatings are one of the most popular and powerful strategies for protecting metals against corrosion. They can be applied in different ways, such as by dipping, spraying, electrophoresis, casting, painting, or flow coating. They offer great flexibility of material designs and cost effectiveness.

Transparent and Self-Healing Elastomers for Reconfigurable 3D Materials.

Transparent soft materials are widely used in applications ranging from packaging to flexible displays, wearable devices, and optical lenses. Nevertheless, soft materials are susceptible to mechanical damage, leading to functional failure and premature disposal. Herein, a transparent self-healing elastomer that is able to repair the polymer network via exchange reactions of dynamic disulfide bonds is introduced.

Tattooing Plastics with Reversible and Irreversible Encryption.

Self-healing materials are explored for restoring mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. Inspired by the process of tattooing on human skin, a method for engraving non-permanent or permanent messages on plastics is developed. A self-healing polymer containing dynamic disulfide bonds is employed as substrate for encryption of written messages.