engleski

Entropy‐Driven Self‐Healing of Metal Oxides Assisted by Polymer–Inorganic Hybrid Materials

Enabling self-healing of materials is crucially important for saving resources and energy in numerous emerging applications. While strategies for the self-healing of polymers are advanced, mechanisms for semiconducting inorganic materials are scarce due to the lack of suitable healing agents. Here we have developed a concept for the self-healing of metal oxides. This concept consists of metal oxide nanoparticle growth inside the bulk of halogenated polymers and their subsequent entropy-driven migration to externally induced defect sites, leading to recovery of the defect. Herein we demonstrate that the pool of self-healing materials has been expanded to include semiconductors, thereby increasing the reliability and sustainability of functional materials through the use of metal oxides. We revealed that electrical properties of ITO can be partially restored upon healing. Such properties are of immediate interest for the further development of transparent flexible electrodes.

self-healing, hybrids, semiconductors, vapor phase infiltration, ITO, zinc oxide, indium oxide

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