Facile Preparation and Study of Self-healing Water-absorbing Expanding Elastomers.

ABSTRACT

The absorbent expansion elastomer plays a crucial role in engineering sealing and holds a promising future in this field as infrastructure continues to develop. Traditional materials have their limitations, especially when used in large construction projects where the integrity and reliability of the material are of utmost importance. In this work, a self-healing water-absorbing expansion elastomer was developed for continuous production at a large scale to monitor the sealing conditions of massive infrastructure projects. At room temperature, the material exhibited a repairing efficiency of 57.77% within 2 h, which increased to 84.02% after 12 h. This extended reaction time allowed for effective repairs when defects were detected. The material's strength reached approximately 3 MPa, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. The volume expansion rate of the material reached 200-400% for effective sealing, and the fictionalization of the packing made it have a good external force sensing effect and prevent heat build-up effect. The conductive detection performance of the absorbent expansion elastomer was improved by utilizing triple self-healing strategies, including dipole-dipole interaction, ion cross-linked network, and externally-aided restoration materials.