Ultrarobust, tough and highly stretchable self-healing materials based on cartilage-inspired noncovalent assembly nanostructure

Self-healing materials integrated with excellent mechanical strength and simultaneously high healing efficiency would be of great use in many fields, however their fabrication has been proven extremely challenging. Here, inspired by biological cartilage, we present an ultra-robust self-healing material by incorporating high density noncovalent bonds at the interfaces between the dentritic tannic acid-modified tungsten disulfide nanosheets and polyurethane matrix to collectively produce a strong interfacial interaction. The resultant nanocomposite material with interwoven network shows excellent tensile strength (52.3 MPa), high toughness (282.7 MJ m⁻³, which is 1.6 times higher than spider silk and 9.4 times higher than metallic aluminum), high stretchability (1020.8%) and excellent healing efficiency (80–100%), which overturns the previous understanding of traditional noncovalent bonding self-healing materials where high mechanical robustness and healing ability are mutually exclusive. Moreover, the interfacical supramolecular crosslinking structure enables the functional-healing ability of the resultant flexible smart actuation devices. This work opens an avenue toward the development of ultrarobust self-healing materials for various flexible functional devices.

Yuyan Wang, Xin Huang, Xinxing Zhang