Cavitation and fracture behavior of polyacrylamide hydrogels

By S. Kundu, A. Crosby. 2009

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The mechanical properties of gels present qualitatively contradictory behavior; they are commonly soft but also notoriously brittle. We investigate the elasticity and fracture behavior of swollen polymer networks using a simple experimental method to induce cavitation within a gel and adapt scaling theories to capture the observed transition from reversible to irreversible deformations as a function of polymer volume fraction. It is shown quantitatively that the transition from reversible cavitation to irreversible fracture depends on the polymer volume fraction and an initial defect length scale. The use of cavitation experiments permits characterization of network properties across length scales ranging from µm to mm. We anticipate that these results may significantly enhance the understanding of mechanical properties of soft materials, both synthetic and biological.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Medicine

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/49893e27a72b697f68f165150ed82fb490e79b63

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In Biomedical Engineering

1. V. Garbin
2. P. Marmottant
3. B. Dollet

In Molecular Medicine

1. V. Garbin
2. P. Marmottant
3. B. Dollet

Citations in the corpus

• Bubble Dynamics in Soft and Biological Matter (2019, methodology): “(g) Cavitation rheology uses quasi-static bubble injection to measure the elastic modulus (Kundu & Crosby 2009). remained in the linear regime.”