Recent progress in luminescent self-healing gels

Abstract

The self-healing phenomenon universally existed in organisms (from molecular level repair of DNA to macroscopic level repair of the soft tissue) is extremely important for organisms to maintain their normal physiological functions. As a smart soft material, self-healing gels attracted much attention owing to repair the damaged structures and functions just like biological features. There is a great challenge to design novel self-healing gels in order to meet the need of multi-functional flexible gels. Endowing self-healing gels with photoluminescent property can promote and extend the applications of gels in biomedical field (biological imaging, drug delivery and biosensors, etc.) and engineering (optical switch, pH sensors and thermal sensors, etc.), which attracts more attention of researchers. This paper reviews the latest design ideas, performance of photoluminescent self-healing gels and their potential applications. The challenges and future development about photoluminescent self-healing gels is also proposed here.