Physical hydrogels composed of polyampholytes demonstrate high toughness and viscoelasticity

DOI IR (HANDLE) HANDLE PDF Web Site View 1 Remaining Hide 163 Citations 37 References Open Access

Description

Hydrogels attract great attention as biomaterials as a result of their soft and wet nature, similar to that of biological tissues. Recent inventions of several tough hydrogels show their potential as structural biomaterials, such as cartilage. Any given application, however, requires a combination of mechanical properties including stiffness, strength, toughness, damping, fatigue resistance and self-healing, along with biocompatibility. This combination is rarely realized. Here, we report that polyampholytes, polymers bearing randomly dispersed cationic and anionic repeat groups, form tough and viscoelastic hydrogels with multiple mechanical properties. The randomness makes ionic bonds of a wide distribution of strength. The strong bonds serve as permanent crosslinks, imparting elasticity, whereas the weak bonds reversibly break and re-form, dissipating energy. These physical hydrogels of supramolecular structure can be tuned to change multiple mechanical properties over wide ranges by using diverse ionic combinations. This polyampholyte approach is synthetically simple and dramatically increases the choice of tough hydrogels for applications.

Journal

  • Nature materials

    Nature materials 12 (10), 932-937, 2013-10

    Nature publishing group

Citations (163)*help

See more

References(37)*help

See more

Related Projects

See more

Keywords

Details 詳細情報について

Report a problem

Back to top