Related papers: Adaptive hydrogels with spatiotemporal stiffening …
Water and glycerol are well-known to facilitate the structural relaxation of amorphous protein matrices. However, several studies evidenced that they may also limit fast ($\sim$ pico-nanosecond, ps-ns) and small-amplitude ($\sim$ \AA )…
With the increasing demand for personalized health monitoring, wearable sensors have gained attention in medical diagnostics and physiological tracking. Hydrogels, known for their mechanical properties and similarity to biological tissues,…
Hydrogels are widespread soft materials, which can serve a wide range of applications. The control over the viscoelastic properties of the gel is of paramount importance. Ongoing environmental issues have raised the consumer's concern…
Chemical crosslinking of collagen is a general strategy to reproduce macroscale tissue properties in physiological environment. However, simultaneous control of protein conformation, material properties and biofunctionality is highly…
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…
Hydrogel adhesion that can be easily modulated in magnitude, space, and time is desirable in many emerging applications ranging from tissue engineering, and soft robotics, to wearable devices. In synthetic materials, these complex adhesion…
Self-regulated actuators harness material intelligence to enable complex deformations and dynamics, representing a significant advancement in automated soft robotics. However, investigations on self-regulated soft actuators, particularly…
Two types of high-strength composite hydrogels possessing the structure of interpenetrating polymer networks were synthesized via free-radical polymerization of acrylamide carried out straight within the matrix of plant or bacterial…
Chemical communication, response, and feedback are key requirements for the function of adaptive materials with life-like properties. However, how communication on the single cell-level impacts the collective structural, dynamical and…
We developed and experimentally verified an analytical model to describe diffusion of oligonucleotides from stable hydrogel beads. The synthesized alginate beads are Fe3+-cross-linked as well as polyelectrolyte-doped for uniformity and…
Solute-intercalation-induced phase separation creates spatial heterogeneities in host materials, a phenomenon ubiquitous in batteries, hydrogen storage, and other energy devices. Despite many efforts, probing intercalation processes at the…
We develop, analyse and numerically simulate a model of a prototype, glucose-driven, rhythmic drug delivery device, aimed at hormone therapies, and based on chemomechanical interaction in a polyelectrolyte gel membrane. The pH-driven…
The emerging applications of hydrogels in devices and machines require these soft materials to maintain robustness under cyclic mechanical loads. Whereas hydrogels have been made tough to resist fracture under a single cycle of mechanical…
Programmable materials are desirable for a variety of functional applications that range from biomedical devices, actuators and soft robots to adaptive surfaces and deployable structures. However, current smart materials are often designed…
Temperature-sensitive hydrogels based on polymers such as poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) undergo a volume phase transition in response to changes in temperature. During this transition, distinct changes in both thermal and mechanical…
Adaptation of the chemotaxis sensory pathway of the bacterium Escherichia coli is integral for detecting chemicals over a wide range of background concentrations, ultimately allowing cells to swim towards sources of attractant and away from…
Polymer gels are comprised of a three-dimensional, cross-linked network that can typically withstand the mechanical deformation associated with both swelling and de-swelling. Thus, gels can be designed with smart behaviors that require both…
Microgels are elastic and deformable particles with a hybrid nature between that of polymers and colloids and unconventional behaviours with respect to hard colloids. We investigated the dynamics of a soft microgel made of interpenetrated…
We present a benchmark study of autonomous, chemical agents exhibiting associative learning of an environmental feature. Associative learning has been widely studied in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, but are most commonly…
Soft matter materials and polymers are widely used in the controlled delivery of drugs. Simulation and modeling provide insight at the atomic scale enabling a level of control unavailable to experiments. We present a workflow protocol for…