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Hydrogels are widely used in myriad applications including those in the biomedical and personal care fields. It is generally the rheology, i.e., the flow and deformation properties, of hydrogels that define their functionalities. However,…
Experimental results from mechanical viscoelastic as well as dielectric relaxation times were compared to theoretical expectations utilizing polymer scaling theory. Viscoelastic relaxation of a hydrogel at 33% relative humidity fabricated…
Ferrogels consist of magnetic colloidal particles embedded in an elastic polymer matrix. As a consequence, their structural and rheological properties are governed by a competition between magnetic particle-particle interactions and…
This article presents a novel computational model to study the selective filtering of biological hydrogels due to the surface charge and size of diffusing particles. It is the first model that includes the random 3D fiber orientation and…
The mechanical properties of cells, which influence the properties of the tissue they belong to, are controlled by various mechanisms. Bi et al. theoretically demonstrated that density-independent rigidity transition occurs in…
Predicting the mechanical response of the soft gel materials under external deformation is of paramount importance in many areas, such as foods, pharmaceuticals, solid-liquid separations, cosmetics, aerogels and drug delivery. Most of the…
As the interface between human and machine becomes blurred, hydrogel incorporated electronics and devices have emerged to be a new class of flexible/stretchable electronic and ionic devices due to their extraordinary properties, such as…
Osmotic pressure is the driving force for the swelling of hydrogels. The hydrogel osmotic pressure can be decomposed into two parts: the mixing part due to polymer-solvent interaction and the elastic part due to polymer chain stretching.…
In this work a continuum model for high frequency poroelastic longitudinal waves in hydrogels is presented. A viscoelastic force describing the interaction between the polymer network and the bounded water present in such materials is…
Biological living materials, such as animal bones and plant stems, are able to self-heal, regenerate, adapt and make decisions under environmental pressures. Despite recent successful efforts to imbue synthetic materials with some of these…
For optimal application, pressure-sensitive adhesives must have rheological properties in between those of a viscoplastic solid and those of a viscoelastic liquid. Such adhesives can be produced by emulsion polymerisation, resulting in…
Particle surface chemistry and internal softness are two fundamental parameters in governing the mechanical properties of dense colloidal suspensions, dictating structure and flow, therefore of interest from materials fabrication to…
Understanding surface mechanics of soft solids, such as soft polymeric gels, is crucial in many engineering processes, such as dynamic wetting and adhesive failure. In these situations, a combination of capillary and elastic forces drives…
Hydrogels are soft materials engineered to suit a multitude of applications that exploit their tunable mechanochemical properties. Dynamic hydrogels employing noncovalent, physically crosslinked networks dominated by either enthalpic or…
Live cells have ambiguous mechanical properties. They were often described as either elastic solids or viscoelastic fluids and have recently been classified as soft glassy materials characterized by weak power-law rheology. Nonlinear…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are smart materials that rapidly switch between hydrophilic (swollen) and hydrophobic (shrunken) states when heated past a threshold temperature, resulting in order-of-magnitude changes in gel volume. Modelling…
Fibre-reinforced hydrogels are promising materials for biomedical applications due to their strength, toughness, and tunability. However, it remains unclear how to design fibre-reinforced hydrogels for use in specific applications due to…
We study a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to investigate its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
\textbf{Background} Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks that can absorb and retain a large fraction of liquid. Near a critical sliding velocity, hydrogels pressed against smooth surfaces exhibit time-dependent frictional behavior…
Suspensions of motile cells are model systems for understanding the unique mechanical properties of living materials which often consist of ensembles of self-propelled particles. We present here a quantitative comparison of theory against…