Flourishing Self‐Healing Surface Materials: Recent Progresses and Challenges

Abstract

In the past few decades, the self‐healing surface materials with durable mechanical, functional, and structural properties have attracted enormous research interests, which exhibit great potential in energy conversion devices, sensors, electronic skins, superhydrophobic fabrics, medical/biological hydrogel, and a protective coating. Despite the remarkable progresses achieved in the self‐healing surface, the systematic and overall reviews that focus on self‐healing surface materials are still lacking and in urgent need. Herein, the recent advances in the development of self‐healing surface materials are summarized. The surface damage forms that composed of cracks, scratches, punctures, and surface wear, are systematically reviewed. The self‐healing mechanism and methods at interface are then introduced to briefly explain the basic design principle. The recent developments of functional surfaces including superhydrophobic, oleophobic, antifogging, anti‐icing, antibiofouling, and anticorrosion surfaces with self‐healing functions are further discussed. Finally, the contemporary challenges, and the future perspectives that motivate are proposed to create more innovative self‐healing materials for diverse fields.

Tailoring the Self‐Healing Properties of Conducting Polymer Films

“…Recent advances in wearable electronics and bioelectronics have brought a great deal of attention to self-healing organic electronic materials, [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] which have been used in devices, such as sensors, [8][9][10] field-effect transistors (FETs), [11,12] electrochemical transistors (ECTs), [13] and energy storage devices. [14,15] The organic conducting polymer poly(3,4-ethylene-dioxythiophene): polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) is an excellent candidate for self-healable electronics, as it combines water-induced or autonomic self-healing with high conductivity and ease of process.…”

Self‐Healing Functional Electronic Devices

“…The preparation methods of microcapsules such as in situ/interface polymerization, melt dispersion, sol-gel reactions, miniemulsion polymerization, and pickering emulsion templating, have been mature. [14,24] Additionally, the wide selectivity of healing agents made self-healing composites have many specific characters, these agents refer to monomers, catalysis, and liquid metal alloys. Blaiszik et al used GaIn alloy as a liquid selfhealing agent, encapsulated eutectic in microcapsules to Figure 1.…”

“…[2,10] In nature, biological systems can heal themselves autonomously and restore their structure and basic function after suffering from external mechanical damage. [14,15] Inspired by the self-healing property in nature, researchers paid lots of attention to artificial self-healing systems to imitate the biological systems. [16,17] Self-healing PWED is one of the main research areas of artificial self-healing systems, which is a merger of self-healing materials and electronic devices.…”

Self-healing polymer–clay hybrids by facile complexation of a waterborne polymer with a clay

“…Self-healing is a capability of the protective layer to recover from its damages involving the rupture of chemical and/or physical bonds. [1][2][3] Among materials showing healing phenomena, selfhealing polymers have been extensively investigated for various applications such as energy storage/conversion devices, 4,5 electronic medical devices (electronic and sensing skin), 6,7 and protective coating (anticorrosion and antifouling) 8,9 in order to extend materials' lifetime and reduce wastes. According to the healing mechanism, self-healing polymers are classified into autonomous and nonautonomous systems in which the damages are healed without and with the assistance of external stimuli, respectively.…”