Related papers: Adaptive hydrogels with spatiotemporal stiffening …
Polyelectrolyte (PE) hydrogels can dynamically respond to external stimuli, such as changes in pH and temperature, which benefits their use for smart materials and nanodevices with tunable properties. We investigate equilibrium…
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…
Catch bonds are interactions whose lifetimes increase under mechanical load, a counterintuitive behaviour that underlies diverse biological processes. Translating this mechanism to synthetic materials offers the potential to create systems…
Hydrogel consists of a crosslinked polymer matrix imbibed with a solvent such as water at volume fractions that can exceed 90\%. They are important in many scientific and engineering applications due to their tunable physiochemical…
Active materials capable of autonomously modulating their mechanical properties are foundational to the development of next-generation soft technologies. Here, we introduce a novel class of extensible biohybrid hydrogels powered by living…
Hydrogels are crosslinked polymer networks with high water content, widely employed in biomedical applications such as drug delivery, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. Injectable, depot-forming hydrogels enable sustained…
The design of hydrogels that combine mechanical robustness with dynamic reconfigurability remains a fundamental challenge, as increasing crosslink dissociation rates compromise network integrity. This limitation is addressed through the…
One of the major challenges in contemporary materials science is to build synthetic structures that can mimic responsive biological tissues, such as artificial skins and muscles. Polyelectrolyte hydrogels can provide such mechanoelectrical…
Responsive hydrogels can sense environmental stimuli and respond as actuators by expelling water and changing shape. In this article, we develop theory to demonstrate that groups of responsive hydrogels can also communicate with each other,…
Implantable hydrogels should ideally possess mechanical properties matched to the surrounding tissues to enable adequate mechanical function while regeneration occurs. This can be challenging, especially when degradable systems with high…
Metal hydrides are critical materials in numerous technologies including hydrogen storage, gas separation, and electrocatalysis. Here, using Pd-H as a model metal hydride, we perform electrochemical insertion studies of hydrogen via liquid…
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…
We investigate dynamical heterogeneities in the collective relaxation of a concentrated microgel system, for which the packing fraction can be conveniently varied by changing the temperature. The packing fraction dependent mechanical…
Thermoresponsive hydrogels have been studied intensively for creating smart drug carriers and controlled drug delivery. Understanding the drug release kinetics and corresponding transport mechanisms of nanoparticles (NPs) in a…
Polymer-based hydrogels have been widely applied for chronic wound therapeutics, due to their well-acclaimed wound exudate management capability. At the same time, there is still an unmet clinical need for simple wound diagnostic tools to…
Self-mated hydrogel contacts show extremely small friction coefficients at low loads but a distinct velocity dependence. Here we combine mesoscopic simulations and experiments to test the polymer-relaxation hypothesis for this velocity…
Hypotheses: Additives are commonly used to tune macromolecular conformational transitions. Among additives, trehalose is an excellent bioprotectant and among responsive polymers, PNIPAM is the most studied material. Nevertheless, their…
Polyamide 6,6 (PA66) is a key engineering polymer, whose unique mechanical properties arise from strong interchain hydrogen bonding. However, its hygroscopic nature makes it highly sensitive to water uptake, which markedly alters its…
We demonstrate the feasibility of using optical transmission to determine concentration-dependent hydrogen diffusion coefficients and activation energies of thin metallic glass films over a wide range of temperatures and concentrations. The…
Hydrogel-based soft actuators can operate in sensitive environments, bridging the gap of rigid machines interacting with soft matter. However, while stimuli-responsive hydrogels can undergo extreme reversible volume changes of up to ~90%,…