Effects of dynamic covalent bond multiplicity on the performance of vitrimeric elastomers

Abstract

It is still a challenge to integrate multiple dynamic covalent bonds (DCBs) into one network, so the effects of DCB multiplicity on the performance of covalent adaptable networks (CANs) are still unclear. In this contribution, based on the versatility of vanillin chemistry, we realized the construction of CANs containing different DCB multiplicities, and thus the influences of DCB multiplicity on the vitrimeric performance of the networks are fairly investigated. It turns out that, with increasing DCB multiplicity, the relaxation time of the networks can be reduced significantly because the dynamic performance of the CANs with double or triple DCBs is determined by not only the activation energy but the synergistic effect of different DCBs. A plausible method was first proposed to quantify the synergistic effect of DCB multiplicity. We envisage that the disclosed findings will provide significant insight into the optimized design of CANs with tunable dynamic performance.