In a new report in NPG Asia materials, Chisa Norioka and a team of scientists in Chemistry and Materials Engineering in Japan, detailed a universal method to easily prepare tough and stretchable hydrogels without special structures or complications. They tuned the polymerization conditions to form networks with many polymer chain entanglements, to achieve energy dissipation throughout the resulting materials. The team prepared the tough and stretchable hydrogels via free radical polymerization using a high monomer concentration and low crosslinker content to optimize the balance between physical and chemical crosslinks via entanglements and covalent bonds. The research team used polymer chain entanglements for energy dissipation to overcome the limits of low mechanical performance for use in a wide-range of hydrogels.
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Source: Phys.org