Soft Materials by Design: Unconventional Polymer Networks Give Extreme Properties
By Xuanhe Zhao, Xiaoyu Chen, Hyunwoo Yuk, Shaoting Lin, Xinyue Liu, G. Parada. Chemical Reviews, 2021
892 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Hydrogels are polymer networks infiltrated with water. Many biological hydrogels in animal bodies such as muscles, heart valves, cartilages, and tendons possess extreme mechanical properties including extremely tough, strong, resilient, adhesive, and fatigue-resistant. These mechanical properties are also critical for hydrogels’ diverse applications ranging from drug delivery, tissue engineering, medical implants, wound dressing, and contact lenses to sensors, actuators, electronic devices, and soft robots. Whereas numerous hydrogels have been developed over the last few decades, a set of general principles that can rationally guide the design of hydrogels using different materials and fabrication methods for various applications remain a central need in the field of soft materials. This review is aimed to synergistically report: i). general design principles for hydrogels to achieve extreme mechanical and physical properties, ii). unconventional polymer networks to implement these design principles, and iii). future directions for the orthogonal design of hydrogels to achieve multiple combined mechanical, physical, chemical, and biological properties. Since these design principles and implementation strategies are based on generic polymer networks, they are also applicable to other soft materials including elastomers and organogels. Overall, the review will not only provide a comprehensive discussion on the rational design of soft materials, but also provoke interdisciplinary discussions on a fundamental question: why does nature select soft materials with unconventional polymer networks to constitute the major parts of animal bodies?
Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Molecular Medicine
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ee2e6493f624329b6c4a8e5e04e61fbe0d69e459
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In Biomedical Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- The shape – morphing performance of magnetoactive soft materials (2021, background): “Very recently, there are a couple of excellent review papers appearing in the literature that focus on various aspects of multifunctional materials such as three-dimensional (3D) printing, also known as additive manufacturing (AM) techniques, hydrogels and other soft polymers and their smart variant”