to achieve self-healing ability under specific environment or external stimulus such as heat or solvent. [10][11][12][13][14] To obtain self-healing ability at room temperature, supramolecular elastomers based on small-molecule system were obtained recently. Leibler and coworkers [15,16] first synthesized a selfhealing elastomer by utilizing vegetable oil fatty acid derivatives with diethylenetriamine (DETA) and urea through a two-step reaction. The obtained material, whose glass transition temperature (T g ) was 28 °C, exhibited rubber-like behavior only if heating over 90 °C or adding 11% w/w dodecane as plasticizer, and showed a spontaneous self-healing ability at room temperature. Montarnal et. al. [17] obtained four different classes of materials by using oligocondensation of 2-aminoethylimidazolidone endcapped mixture of fatty acid with DETA and urea. Bao and co-workers [18] described an elastic nanocomposite material with the ability to rapidly self-heal at room temperature by combining a fatty tri-acid, DETA, and graphene oxide as a macrocrosslinker. Zhang and co-workers [19] obtained supramolecular elastomers through reacting linear carboxyl-terminated polydimethylsiloxane oligomers (PDMS-COOH 2 ) with DETA and urea. Our previous work [20] synthesized a self-healing supramolecular elastomer with small-molecular biological acids. The synthesized materials behaved as rubber at room temperature without additional plasticizers or crosslinkers.However, the small-molecule systems by hydrogen-bond interactions are easier to suffer from low mechanical properties and poor solvent-resistance than macromolecular systems due to the lack of molecular chain entanglement. In order to overcome this problem, hybrid networks containing covalent and hydrogen bonds were developed. These researches used epoxide (diepoxide and tetraepoxide) as manageable crosslinker to enhance mechanical properties and insolubility by controlling stoichiometries and side reactions, [21][22][23] which in turn decreased self-healing behavior. Hence, a supramolecular elastomer with self-healing behavior and solvent-resistance and tunable mechanical properties is desirable.Herein, we design a new reaction system and use sebacic acid and lignin as main raw materials to synthesize a ligninbased supramolecular elastomer (LSE). The synthesis route of
Self-Healing ElastomersThe purpose of this work is to demonstrate a new design strategy to produce a self-healing supramolecular elastomer with solvent resistance and biocompatibility and tunable mechanical properties. This aim is successfully achieved by synthesizing a lignin-based supramolecular elastomer (LSE) through branching amide molecular chains on the lignin. The use of lignin effectively reduces the glass transition temperature and the degree of crystallinity of LSEs and generates urea-modified hydrogen bond groups to obtain self-healing capability. The synthesized LSEs behave as rubber and exhibit spontaneous self-healing behavior at room temperature without external stimuli. The mechanical an...