Macromolecular Additives to Turn a Thermoplastic Elastomer into a Self-Healing Material

Self-healing allows increasing the service life of materials by overcoming some issues caused by mechanical failures. We propose a new concept to impart room-temperature self-healing properties to thermoplastic elastomers. A macromolecular additive whose interacting units can interfere with the hard segments of the thermoplastic elastomer accelerates chain dynamics and imparts self-healing properties to the composite material with a limited detrimental effect on mechanical properties. By applying this concept to silicone-based elastomers, we have obtained an autonomously self-healing material with a relatively high elastic modulus for this type of elastomers.