Physical hydrogels composed of polyampholytes demonstrate high toughness and viscoelasticity
Open accessAbstract
Hydrogels attract great attention as biomaterials as a result of their soft and wet nature, similar to that of biological tissues. Recent inventions of several tough hydrogels show their potential as structural biomaterials, such as cartilage. Any given application, however, requires a combination of mechanical properties including stiffness, strength, toughness, damping, fatigue resistance and self-healing, along with biocompatibility. This combination is rarely realized. Here, we report that polyampholytes, polymers bearing randomly dispersed cationic and anionic repeat groups, form tough and viscoelastic hydrogels with multiple mechanical properties. The randomness makes ionic bonds of a wide distribution of strength. The strong bonds serve as permanent crosslinks, imparting elasticity, whereas the weak bonds reversibly break and re-form, dissipating energy. These physical hydrogels of supramolecular structure can be tuned to change multiple mechanical properties over wide ranges by using diverse ionic combinations. This polyampholyte approach is synthetically simple and dramatically increases the choice of tough hydrogels for applications.
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During stretching of DN hydrogels, mechanical energy is dissipated by sacrificing the breakage of chemical bonds in the densely crosslinked polymer network or by the perturbation of non-covalent interactions, improving the mechanical deformability of the hydrogel.
“During the stretching of DN hydrogels, the mechanical energy is dissipated by sacrificing the breakage of chemical bonds in the densely crosslinked polymer network, or by the perturbation of non-covalent interactions, thereby improving the mechanical deformability of the hydrogel”
From Functionalized Hydrogel-Based Wearable Gas and Humidity Sensors. (2023) · cites this paper as [124]
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- Authors
- Sun, T. L., Kurokawa, T., Kuroda, S., Ihsan, A. B., Akasaki, T., Sato, K., Haque, M. A., Nakajima, T., & Gong, J. P.
- Affiliations
- Hokkaido University (JP)
- Corresponding author
- Gong, Jian Ping
- Venue
- Nature Materials
- Published
- 2013-07-28
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 10
- Pages
- 932-937
- ISSN
- 1476-1122 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4660
- OpenAlex
- W2045931865
- Cited by
- 2,089
- References
- 51
- Citations by year
- 2026: 108 · 2025: 186 · 2024: 184 · 2023: 177 · 2022: 228 · 2021: 227 · 2020: 209 · 2019: 194 · 2018: 196 · 2017: 147 · 2016: 101 · 2015: 82 · 2014: 45 · 2013: 4
- FWCI
- 35.26
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Locations
- Nature Materials (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Institutional Repositories DataBase (IRDB) (submittedVersion)
- Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers (Hokkaido University) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (24225006)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Medicine › Hydrogels: synthesis, properties, applications
- Physical Sciences › Materials Science › Biomaterials › Supramolecular Self-Assembly in Materials
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Food Science › Polysaccharides Composition and Applications
- Keywords
- polyampholyte hydrogels, tough hydrogels, viscoelasticity, supramolecular hydrogels, self-healing materials, fracture resistance, shock absorption, biomaterials
- MeSH terms
- Biocompatible Materials, Elasticity, Electrolytes, Electrons, Tensile Strength, Viscosity, Hydrogels, Polymerization
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