In recent decades, flexible, reconfigurable, and fast-response self-healing polymers have attracted considerable attention for both industrial field and scientific research. Mechanical blending remains the most mature, economical, effective, and the simplest approach to produce polymer blends, which can combine several distinctive advantages from different thermoplastic materials. However, such a process cannot be simply applied to thermosetting materials due to their permanent molecular structures. The synthesis of high-performance polymer blends connected by covalent cross-links remains a big challenge for the present industrial system. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach to synthesize polymer blends via blending thermosetting vitrimer containing dynamic covalent networks with thermoplastic polymers. It is demonstrated that the intrinsic relationship could be established by controlling the bond exchange reactions between the thermoset and the thermoplastic, thus triggering copolymerization. Due to the highly controlled processing conditions, the synthesized polymer is highly flexible, recyclable, and reprocessable, and possesses self-healing behavior at the same time. In addition, it shows potential applications in adhesive film and wearable electronics. This new technology opens a new way to reprocess thermoset in a fashion similar to thermoplastic in the current polymer industry.

Chitin nano-whiskers (CNWs) are high performance nanomaterials that can be extracted from chitin, which is one of the most widely available bio-resources. Herein we investigate the effect of CNWs on the morphological, mechanical, dynamic mechanical and thermal properties of DGEBA epoxy. Optically transparent, bulk epoxy nano-composites with 0.25 wt%, 0.5 wt% and 0.75 wt% CNWs were evaluated in addition to neat epoxy. The composites were prepared based on a modified slurry compounding method. CNWs appear to be well dispersed within the epoxy matrix with increasing tendency for clustering as the CNW content is increased. The addition of 0.25 wt% CNWs to neat epoxy results in a decrease in the glass transition temperature and an increase in the tensile strength, modulus, damping and thermal degradation temperature. All the composites evaluated with CNWs showed distinct crack arrest events upon initiation of the first major crack growth during fracture toughness testing.Composites with 0.75 wt% CNWs showed the highest damping and an increase in the fracture toughness and resilience over neat epoxy.