Construction of Autonomic Self-Healing CO2-Based Polycarbonates via One-Pot Tandem Synthetic Strategy

The coupling of epoxides and carbon dioxide to polycarbonates (CO2-PCs) has been the subject of intense research for nearly half a century. Although tremendous progress has been achieved, their aliphatic characteristics and lack of timctionalities of CO2-PCs limit the scope of their application in high value-added and functional materials. In this article, the first CO2-based polycarbonate with the ability to autonomously self-heal is constructed via a one-pot synthetic strategy. The key to the success of the synthetic strategy is efficient tandem three different catalytic reactions, i.e., hydrolysis of epoxides, immortal copolymerization of CO2/epoxides, and thiol-ene click reactions one-pot process. Based on the standard tensile testing,, these CO2-based materials show robust self healing properties, where the extensibility maximal strength, and Young's modulus of the specimens can almost entirely recover to their original value under ambient temperature. Our studies demonstrate that the self-healing capability of these CO2-based materials, arises both from the homo-hydrogen bonding (between amide groups) and the hetero-hydrogen bonding (between amide group and carbonate group of polycarbonate backbone). The convenient and atom economic synthesis strategy, combined with the impressive self-healing capability for these materials, should expand the library of high value-added CO2-based polycarbonates and the scope of their applications.