Room-temperature self-healing glassy polymer

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My research focuses on developing room-temperature self-healing glassy polymers. In 2018, we reported a groundbreaking discovery of poly(ether-thiourea) TUEG3 as the first room-temperature self-healable glassy polymer (Yanagisawa et al., Science 2018, 357, 72). This polymer possesses a large number of nonlinear zigzag arrays of H-bonded thiourea units, rendering it non-crystalline but amorphous over a wide temperature range. Remarkably, it exhibits self-healing behavior even at a low temperature of 12 °C, which is significantly below its glass transition temperature (Tg) of 27 °C.This pioneering work challenged the preconception that mechanically robust polymers cannot self-heal at ambient temperatures. Although there have been some recent reports of other room-temperature self-healable glassy polymers, the successful examples are still limited. In my research, I have developed a new room-temperature self-healable glassy polymer with repeating monomeric units that consist not only of a thiourea group but also a disulfide group, which can be reversibly cleaved off to provide the polymer with dynamic healing properties.Overall, my research contributes to the growing field of self-healing materials and opens up new possibilities for the development of advanced polymer materials with enhanced mechanical properties and extended functional lifetimes.