Water accelerated self-healing of hydrophobic copolymers

Abstract

Self-healing of polymers became a vivid research area, but self-healing under water and its mechanistic concepts are less investigated. Here, the authors report water accelerated self-healing in a pMMA/nBA copolymer and demonstrate that perturbation of ubiquitous van der Walls forces upon mechanical damage in hydrophobic polymers in the presence of water is energetically unfavorable and accelerates self-healing.