How to prepare high-strength and high-toughness hydrogels has always been a key problem in the field of hydrogels. In order to solve this problem, Feng Jiang's team at the University of British Columbia was inspired by the preparation process of natural spider silk protein and proposed a novel method for preparing high-strength and high-toughness hydrogels. In this method, the physical interaction between hydrogels was enhanced by the salting-out-orientation-locking strategy (SALT), and the anisotropic arrangement of molecular chains in the orientation direction was promoted, so as to construct high-strength hydrogels.
Through the SALT method, PVA hydrogels with weak mechanical properties, such as gelatin hydrogels, can be mechanically strengthened by up to 1000 times, thus laying the foundation for the preparation of new high-strength hydrogels.
At the same time, the team also carefully explored the nanostructure and enhancement mechanism inside the hydrogel through SAXS and WAXS, and the results showed that the abundant molecular chains of physical interaction and orientation were the main reasons for the gel enhancement. This also provides inspiration for the construction of hydrogels in the next step.
Figure 1: Comparison of bio-inspired hydrogel preparation process and mechanical properties
Figure 2: Anisotropic properties and mechanical properties of hydrogels.
Figure 3: Analysis of the enhancement mechanism of hydrogels
Figure 4: The generalizability of the SALT method and how it compares to other methods. In conclusion, through bio-inspiration, the team developed a novel method for the preparation of high-strength and high-toughness hydrogels and carefully explored the mechanism of enhancement and toughening of hydrogels. This broadens the direction for the development of high-strength and high-toughness hydrogels in the future. The work is presented with "A Biomimetic" Salting Out-Alignment-Locking" Tactic to Design Strong and Tough Hydrogel." published in Advanced Materials (10.1002/adma.202400084). The first author of the article is Xia Sun, a PhD student at the Sustainable Functional Biomaterials Lab at the University of British Columbia. Professor Feng Jiang from the Department of Wood Science, College of Forestry, University of British Columbia, is the sole corresponding author of the paper. The Sustainable Functional Biomaterials Lab, Department of Wood Science, College of Forestry, University of British Columbia, was the first corresponding unit for the paper. Full text link:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.202400084 Source: Frontiers of Polymer Science