Introducing dynamic covalent bonding into thermoset polymers has received considerable attention because they can repair or recover when damaged, thereby minimizing waste and extending the service life of thermoset polymers. However, most of the yielded dynamic covalent bonds require an extra catalyst, high temperature and high-pressure conditions to trigger their self-healing properties. Herein, we report on a catalyst-free bis-dynamic covalent polymer network containing vinylogous urethane and disulfide bonds. It is revealed that the introduction of disulfide bonds significantly reduces the activation energy (reduced from 94 kJ/mol to 51 kJ/mol) of the polymer system for exchanging and promotes the self-healing efficiency (with a high efficiency of 86.92% after being heated at 100 °C for 20 h) of the material. More importantly, the mechanical properties of the healed materials are comparable to those of the initial ones due to the special bis-dynamic covalent polymer network. These results suggest that the bis-dynamic covalent polymer network made of disulfide and inter-vinyl ester bonds opens a new strategy for developing high-performance vitrimer polymers.
This paper studies the effects of planting plants and coupled microbial fuel cells (MFCs) on the decontamination capacity and purification mechanism of constructed wetlands (CWs). Four systems were set, namely CW-without plants (A1), CW-with plants (A2), CW-MFC-without plants (A3) and CW-MFC-with plants (A4). The daily reductions per unit area of chemical oxygen demand (COD) were 48.72 ± 5.42, 51.26 ± 4.10, 53.49 ± 5.44 and 58.54 ± 4.16 g·(d·m2)−1, respectively. The daily reductions per unit area of nitrogen (N) were 11.89 ± 0.73, 12.38 ± 0.76, 12.24 ± 0.79 and 13.61 ± 1.07 g·(d·m2)−1, respectively. After studying the pollutant removal efficiency, it was found that the unit area of A4 removes the highest number of pollutants, improving the area efficiency of the wetland system and fundamentally alleviating the disadvantage of the large land footprint of wetland processes. The average output voltages of A3 and A4 were 568.29 and 717.46 mV, respectively, and the maximum power densities were 4.59 and 15.87 mW/m3, respectively. In addition, after high-throughput analysis of microbial samples, anaerobic ammonia oxidising (anammox) bacteria were found to remove N from the system in the anaerobic anode region.
Over the last decade, there has been a lot of interest in incorporating dynamic covalent bonds (DCBs) into epoxy resins. Because diselenide and disulfide bonds have similar properties, they are frequently used as DCBs in self-healing epoxy networks. In this paper, we present diselenide and disulfide dynamic linkers containing epoxy networks by analyzing the effects of mechanical properties, thermal stability, activation energies, and self-healing properties. The glass transition temperature (Tg) values, mechanical properties, crosslinking density (ve), and thermal stability of disulfide linkers networks were higher than those of diselenide linkers networks, according to our research. The activation energies of disulfide linkers were higher than those of diselenide linkers (up to 14 kJ/mol), but their healing efficiency was lower than that of the diselenide network. These findings demonstrate the advantages of diselenide and disulfide dynamic linkers in epoxy networks systems, as well as a method for designing and preparing the appropriate diselenide dynamic linkers or disulfide dynamic linkers incorporated into epoxy networks for the appropriate application and processing technology.
8 December 2025 in Journal of Colloid and Interface Science