Printable Tough Adhesive for Instant Fatigue-Resistant Bonding of Diverse Surfaces

Adhesives can stably hold adherent components together. However, a simple design of a high-performance printable tough adhesive (PTA) with instant fatigue-resistant adhesion on various substrates is still a significant challenge. Here, the authors report a rapid design to meet this requirement that enables one-step adhesion of PTA on wet and dry, porous, and nonporous surfaces low as 5 s. This design gives an interfacial toughness of ≈3000 J m −2 and comparable mechanical and fatigue-resistant properties. The adhesive precursor can be used as an adhesive paint for bonding materials even underwater and maintains strong adhesion under several thousand cycles of large deformation or in a wide temperature range. Moreover, the PTA precursor is chemically stable and controllable, thus benefiting the printing of heterogeneous, 4D shape-memory composites and a wearable electroluminescent sensor. It is anticipated that this rapid one-step design of PTA opens new horizons to tough adhesion of diverse surfaces.