Design principles for strong and tough hydrogels

X Li, JP Gong - Nature Reviews Materials, 2024‏ - nature.com
Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks swollen with water. Owing to their soft and
water-containing nature, hydrogels are promising materials for applications in many fields …

Recent advances in stimuli‐responsive shape‐morphing hydrogels

X Liu, M Gao, J Chen, S Guo, W Zhu… - Advanced Functional …, 2022‏ - Wiley Online Library
Inspired by shape‐morphing organisms in nature, researchers have developed various
hydrogels with stimuli‐responsive swelling, shrinking, bending, folding, origami, rolling …

Fatigue-free artificial ionic skin toughened by self-healable elastic nanomesh

J Wang, B Wu, P Wei, S Sun, P Wu - Nature Communications, 2022‏ - nature.com
Robust ionic sensing materials that are both fatigue-resistant and self-healable like human
skin are essential for soft electronics and robotics with extended service life. However, most …

Solvent‐exchange‐assisted wet annealing: A new strategy for superstrong, tough, stretchable, and anti‐fatigue hydrogels

Y Wu, Y Zhang, H Wu, J Wen, S Zhang… - Advanced …, 2023‏ - Wiley Online Library
Hydrogels are widely used in tissue engineering, soft robots, wearable electronics, etc.
However, it remains a great challenge to develop hydrogels possessing simultaneously high …

Additive manufacturing of highly entangled polymer networks

AP Dhand, MD Davidson, HM Zlotnick, TJ Kolibaba… - Science, 2024‏ - science.org
Incorporation of polymer chain entanglements within a single network can synergistically
improve stiffness and toughness, yet attaining such dense entanglements through vat …

A hyperelastic hydrogel with an ultralarge reversible biaxial strain

L Chen, Z **, W Feng, L Sun, H Xu, C Wang - Science, 2024‏ - science.org
Hyperelastic materials exhibit a nonlinear elastic response to large strains, whereas
hydrogels typically possess a low elastic range due to the nonuniform cross-linking and …

Entangled mesh hydrogels with macroporous topologies via cryogelation for rapid atmospheric water harvesting

J Sun, F Ni, J Gu, M Si, D Liu, C Zhang… - Advanced …, 2024‏ - Wiley Online Library
Sorption‐based atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH) is a promising technology to alleviate
freshwater scarcity. Recently, hygroscopic salt‐hydrogel composites (HSHCs) have …

Establishing superfine nanofibrils for robust polyelectrolyte artificial spider silk and powerful artificial muscles

W He, M Wang, G Mei, S Liu, AQ Khan, C Li… - Nature …, 2024‏ - nature.com
Spider silk exhibits an excellent combination of high strength and toughness, which
originates from the hierarchical self-assembled structure of spidroin during fiber spinning. In …

Functional tough hydrogels: design, processing, and biomedical applications

X Kuang, MO Arıcan, T Zhou, X Zhao… - Accounts of Materials …, 2022‏ - ACS Publications
Conspectus Hydrogels are high-water-content soft materials with widely tunable
physicochemical properties, resembling soft tissues. Tremendous progress in engineering …

Bioinspired 2D isotropically fatigue‐resistant hydrogels

X Liang, G Chen, S Lin, J Zhang, L Wang… - Advanced …, 2022‏ - Wiley Online Library
Engineering conventional hydrogels with muscle‐like anisotropic structures can efficiently
increase the fatigue threshold over 1000 J m− 2 along the alignment direction; however, the …