Self-healing, highly stretchable conductive polyurethane elastomers containing aniline trimers with shape memory effect

Abstract

Electroactive elastomeric materials have gained a lot of attention in the last decades due to their fascinating real-life applications. To improve the durability and lifetime of the materials, it is extremely necessary to endow them with self-healing capabilities. In this study, we successfully prepared an electroactive elastomeric polyurethane ATPU-20 that can self-heal with high tensile and shape memory by one-pot copolymerization. ATPU-20 not only possesses excellent self-healing properties (94.04 % of the original tensile strength restored by healing for 12 h at 70 °C) but also has a high tensile strength (17.46 MPa) and a good fracture strain (more than 1000 %). We hope that such an ATPU-20 system will provide a simple method for designing durable electroactive, self-healing elastomeric polymer materials, and that the prepared materials will have potential applications in fields such as biomedicine, chemical sensing, and flexible electronics.