DEVELOPMENT OF NEW SELF-HEALING MATERIALS BASED ON NOVEL DIELS – ALDER REACTIONS

In the field of self-healing, Diels-Alder chemistry was introduced by Chen et al.[1] in 2002 with the use of furan-maleimide systems. This approach led to a system that, when heated, could heal multiple times. The obtained temperature range (forward reaction: 60-90°C – backward reaction 90-150°C) is however not ideal. The forward reaction should occur at ambient (or even lower) temperature while the backward reaction should occur higher than usage temperature, which will depend on the desired application. For this reason novel Diels-Alder reactions, that have the desired properties, are being investigated. This work represents the development of those reactions for the synthesis of self-healing thermoset materials. In the first phase, different model reactions on small molecules were investigated to get a detailed description of the reaction speed, reversibility, possible side reactions and temperature range. In the second step, the knowledge of these model reactions was transferred to reversible polymer conjugation. This allowed the complete characterisation of the new systems on polymer level. The final phase of this wor