Peptidoglycan-inspired autonomous ultrafast self-healing bio-friendly elastomers for bio-integrated electronics
Luzhi Zhang, Jiahui Liang, Chenyu Jiang, Zenghe Liu, Lijie Sun, Shuo Chen, Huixia Xuan, Dong Lei, Qingbao Guan, Xiaofeng Ye, Zhengwei You
Abstract
Elastomers are essential for stretchable electronics, which have become more and more important in bio-integrated devices. To ensure high compliance with the application environment, elastomers are expected to resist, and even self-repair, mechanical damage, while being friendly to the human body. Herein, inspired by peptidoglycan, we designed the first room-temperature autonomous self-healing biodegradable and biocompatible elastomers, poly(sebacoyl 1,6-hexamethylenedicarbamate diglyceride) (PSeHCD) elastomers. The unique structure including alternating ester-urethane moieties and bionic hybrid crosslinking endowed PSeHCD elastomers superior properties including ultrafast self-healing, tunable biomimetic mechanical properties, facile reprocessability, as well as good biocompatibility and biodegradability. The potential of the PSeHCD elastomers was demonstrated as a super-fast self-healing stretchable conductor (21 s) and motion sensor (2 min). This work provides a new design and synthetic principle of elastomers for applications in bio-integrated electronics.