Robust antifogging coatings with ultra-fast self-healing performances through host-guest strategy

Given the vulnerability of conventional antifogging coatings to mechanical damage, self-healing capability can significantly restore their functionality, but are difficult to materialize quickly and effectively. Herein, we report a facile UV-curable antifogging coating, based on host-guest interaction to obtain both ultra-fast self-healing performance and robust mechanical properties. Initially, a pair of host-guest supermolecules (HGSM) consisting of acrylic beta-cyclodextrin (A beta-CD) and acrylic adamantane (AAM) are synthesized and utilized as cross-linkers. Together with hydrophilic and hydrophobic moieties, 2-acrylamide-2-methylpropane sulfonic acid (AMPS) and methyl methacrylate (MMA), a robust antifogging coating with ultra-fast self-healing ability is developed via a facile UV curing process. Benefitting from the delicate balance of both hydrophilic and hydrophobic constituents, the resultant coatings display excellent antifogging performance with -90 % of light transmission, ranging from -20 degrees C to 85 degrees C. The unique non-covalent host-guest structure was covalently integrated into a cross-linked network, as-prepared coating and bulk gel exhibited ultra-fast self-healing capability, needing only -15 s to completely heal the cracks under the hot-steam environment (85 degrees C). And the bulk gels with host-guest recognition can significantly improve its self-healing efficiency to -88.3 %, significantly greater than its Hbonding counterpart (43.5 %). Notably, the prepared coating with strong adhesion properties (-431 KPa) is robust enough to withstand 1,000 cycles of abrasion and 2 h of water immersion to maintain excellent antifogging performance. This strategy might open new avenues for accelerating the use of host-guest assembly to rapidly build effective antifogging/self-healing coatings and promote their applications in more harsh fogging conditions.