Surface modification of transitional metal dichalcogenides for intrinsically self-healing hydrogels Chirag R. Ratwani 1, Ali Reza Kamali 2 , Mark Hadfield 1 , Amr Abdelkader 1 1 Bournemouth University, UK, 2 Northeastern University, China Transitional metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have attracted a lot of research owing to their diverse electronic properties and the ability to fine-tune them. Polymer/TMD composites have been used in past for many engineering applications such as energy storage, sensing applications, and dye-sensitized solar cells. [1] Due to the constant loading-unloading of stresses on the materials in such engineering applications, smart materials that can perceive and heal damage would prove to be a boon. When disulfide-based TMDs such as WS 2 and MoS 2 are used for chemically bonded self-healing materials, they tend to hinder the self-healing process by restricting the segmental polymeric chain movement. In this study, thiol-ligand conjugation was employed to impart bonding sites to WS 2 nanosheets, which were used to further make mechanically robust, conductive, and self-healable hydrogel with high healing efficiency. The introduction of functionalized nanosheets resulted in excellent healing efficiency (>90%) and significantly improved the tensile strength. The hydrogel retained its healing ability even after separating the cleaved pieces for 8 hours and conductivity could be easily tuned by changing the nanosheet loading in the hydrogel. Advanced imaging and spectroscopic techniques were also used to study self-healing ability. The functionalization technique provides a novel pathway to develop polymer-semiconductor nanocomposites with high conductivity and biocompatibility. References 1. Yuan, C., Zhou, Y., Zhu, Y.et al.Polymer/molecular semiconductor all-organic composites for high-temperature dielectric energy storage.Nat Commun11,3919 (2020).
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