Satisfactory Tensile Strength and Strain of Recyclable Polyurethane with a Trimaleimide Structure for Thermal Self-Healing and Anticorrosive Coatings

Bismaleimide (BMI) is often used as the cross-linking reagent in Diels–Alder (D–A)-type intrinsic self-healing materials (DISMs) to promote the connectivity of damaged surfaces based on reversible D–A bond formation on the molecular scale. Until now, although DISMs have exhibited great potential in the applications of various sensors, electronic skin, and artificial muscles, it is still difficult to prepare DISMs with satisfactory self-healing abilities and high tensile strengths and strains at the same time, thus largely limiting their applications in self-healing anticorrosive coatings. Herein, symmetrical trimaleimide (TMI) was successfully synthesized, and trimaleimide-structured D–A self-healing polyurethane (TMI–DA–PU) was prepared via the reversible D–A reaction (cycloaddition of furan and maleimide). As a DISM, TMI–DA–PU exhibits apparently higher self-healing efficiency (98.7%), tensile strength (25.4 MPa), and strain (1378%) compared to bismaleimide-structured D–A self-healing polyurethane (BMI–DA–PU) (self-healing efficiency, 90.2%; tensile strength, 19.3 MPa; strain, 1174%). In addition, TMI–DA–PU shows a high recycling efficiency (>95%) after 4 cycles of recycling. A series of characterizations indicate that TMI provides more monoene rings as the self-healing sites, forms denser cross-linked structures compared to BMI, and is, thus, more appropriate to be used for DISM applications. Moreover, the barrier abilities of coatings can be semi-quantitatively expressed by the impedance value at 0.01 Hz (| Z | 0.01 Hz ). The | Z | 0.01 Hz value of the TMI–DA–PU coating is 3.93 × 10 9 Ω cm 2 on day 0, which is significantly higher than that of the BMI–DA–PU coating (6.76 × 10 8 Ω cm 2 on day 0), indicating that the denser rigid cross-linked structure of TMI results in the small porosity in the TMI–DA–PU coating, thus effectively improving the anticorrosion performance. The construction of DISMs with the structure of TMI demonstrates immense potential in self-healing anticorrosive coatings.