Molecularly Engineered Dual-Crosslinked Hydrogel with Ultrahigh Mechanical Strength, Toughness, and Good Self-Recovery

摘要

Hydrogels are widely researched "soft and wet" materials and have achieved much progress in sensing,drug delivery, actuation, tissue engineering, etc. In comparison with other "hard" polymeric materials, hydrogels can respond more easily to external stimuli in different ways. However, they usually do not have enough mechanical strength due to its intrinsic structural inhomogeneity or lacking effective energy dissipation mechanism and largely limit their application in many fields. Exploring ultrahigh strength hydrogels behaving like natural load-bearing soft tissues like tendon, cartilage, muscle, and blood vessels have many application potentials. During the past decades, many efforts have been devoted in this regard by introducing effective energy dissipation mechanism or designing distinctive structure to fabricate tough hydrogels, such as double-network hydrogels, nano-composite hydrogels, slide-ring hydrogels, nanostructured hydrogels, tetra-arm poly(ethylene glycol) hydrogels, microgel-reinforced hydrogels, macromolecular microsphere composite (MMC) hydrogels, polyampholytes hydrogels, and others.