Assessment of healed scratches in intrinsic healing coatings by AC/DC/AC accelerated electrochemical procedure

• Hybrid sol–gel dual networks are used as healable protective coatings.
• ACDCAC is introduced as an evaluation technique of self-healing intrinsic coatings.
• The goodness of the healed scratch can be assessed by ACDCAC.
• Conditions for optimal healing can be determined by ACDCAC.

In the last years several intrinsic and extrinsic healing coatings have been presented in the literature. While extrinsic coatings have attracted more attention when dealing with electrochemical characterization techniques, protective intrinsic healing coatings have mainly been analyzed by traditional electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). In this article we introduce the potential use of the AC/DC/AC accelerated electrochemical protocol as a suitable tool for the fast evaluation of the goodness of the polymer-polymer interface (i.e. scar) in a healed scratch. For the purpose we employed a hybrid healable dual network coating containing disulfide linkages as the responsible reversible groups for the necessary local mobility and subsequent scratch interface sealing. The results obtained show the high discriminating power of AC/DC/AC of the level of interface sealing at the scratch in much faster times than traditional EIS.

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