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Polymers with dynamic bonds are able to self-heal their fractured interfaces and restore the mechanical strengths. It is largely elusive how to analytically model this self-healing behavior to construct the mechanistic relationship between the self-healing properties (e.g., healed interfacial strength and equilibrium healing time) and the material compositions and healing conditions. Here, we take a self-healable nanocomposite hydrogel as an example to illustrate an interfacial self-healing theory for hydrogels with dynamic bonds. In the theory, we consider the free polymer chains diffuse across the interface and reform crosslinks to bridge the interface. We analytically reveal that the healed strengths of nanocomposite hydrogels increase with the healing time in an error-function-like form. The equilibrium self-healing time of the full-strength recovery decreases with the temperature and increases with the nanoparticle concentration. We further analytically reveal that the healed interfacial strength decreases with increasing delaying time before the healing process. The theoretical results quantitatively match with our experiments on nanosilica hydrogels, and also agree well with other researchers’ experiments on nanoclay hydrogels. We expect that this theory would open promising avenues for quantitative understanding of the self-healing mechanics of various polymers with dynamic bonds, and offer insights for designing high-performance self-healing polymers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nanocomposite hydrogels with only nanoparticle crosslinkers exhibit extraordinarily higher stretchability and toughness than the conventional organically crosslinked hydrogels, thus showing great potential in the applications of artificial muscles and cartilages. Despite their potential, the microscopic mechanics details underlying their mechanical performance have remained largely elusive. Here, we develop a constitutive model of the nanoparticle hydrogels to elucidate the microscopic mechanics behaviors, including the microarchitecture and evolution of the nanoparticle crosslinked polymer chains during the mechanical deformation. The constitutive model enables us to understand the Mullins effect of the nanocomposite hydrogels, and the effects of nanoparticle concentrations and sizes on their cyclic stress–strain behaviors. The theory is quantitatively validated by the tensile tests on a nanocomposite hydrogel with nanosilica crosslinkers. The theory can also be extended to explain the mechanical behaviors of existing hydrogels with nanoclay crosslinkers, and the necking instability of the composite hydrogels with both nanoparticle crosslinkers and organic crosslinkers. We expect that this constitutive model can be further exploited to reveal mechanics behaviors of novel particle-polymer chain interactions, and to design unprecedented hydrogels with both high stretchability and toughness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]