The Deeply Understanding of the Self-Healing Mechanism for Self-Healing Behavior of Supramolecular Materials Based on Cyclodextrin-Guest Interactions

Cyclodextrin (CD)-based host-guest interactions are one of the important supramolecular interactions and have been playing significant role in the design of self-healing materials due to high selectivity and dynamic equilibrium. However, a deeper understanding of the self-healing mechanism is still rare, although self-healing materials based on CD-guest interactions have many advantages. This study provides a first step for the fundamental understanding of the influence factors on self-healing behavior of materials containing CD-guest complexes. It is found that the healing motifs are CD-guest interactions. Sufficient polymer chains mobility, a small amount of water, and high inclusion constant (K) of host-guest interactions are also essential to the self-healing process. The threshold of K value is around 10(2) M-1.