RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Anti-fatigue-fracture hydrogels
JF Science Advances
JO Sci Adv
FD American Association for the Advancement of Science
SP eaau8528
DO 10.1126/sciadv.aau8528
VO 5
IS 1
A1 Lin, Shaoting
A1 Liu, Xinyue
A1 Liu, Ji
A1 Yuk, Hyunwoo
A1 Loh, Hyun-Chae
A1 Parada, German A.
A1 Settens, Charles
A1 Song, Jake
A1 Masic, Admir
A1 McKinley, Gareth H.
A1 Zhao, Xuanhe
YR 2019
UL http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/1/eaau8528.abstract
AB The emerging applications of hydrogels in devices and machines require hydrogels to maintain robustness under cyclic mechanical loads. Whereas hydrogels have been made tough to resist fracture under a single cycle of mechanical load, these toughened gels still suffer from fatigue fracture under multiple cycles of loads. The reported fatigue threshold for synthetic hydrogels is on the order of 1 to 100 J/m2. We propose that designing anti-fatigue-fracture hydrogels requires making the fatigue crack encounter and fracture objects with energies per unit area much higher than that for fracturing a single layer of polymer chains. We demonstrate that the controlled introduction of crystallinity in hydrogels can substantially enhance their anti-fatigue-fracture properties. The fatigue threshold of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) with a crystallinity of 18.9 weight % in the swollen state can exceed 1000 J/m2.