hydrogel

Nemo lives in the ocean near the Great Barrier Reef. One day, he bought a hydrogel balloon which is inflated by an inner pressure p. Will the balloon burst eventually or stay safe?

Dear Colleagues,

Here is our recent paper “Fatigue Fracture of Self-Recovery Hydrogels”. To the hydrogel community, this paper distinguishes the fatigue fracture and the self-recovery of a hydrogel. To the mechanics community, we show that, for the first time in hydrogels, the fatigue threshold depends only on the covalent network, but not on the noncovalent interactions that provide dissipation.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsmacrolett.8b00045?journalCode=a…

Dear colleagues,

Attached please find our new paper "Fatigue fracture of tough hydrogels" published on Extreme Mechanics Letters.

Fatigue fracture of tough hydrogels

Ruobing Bai, Quansan Yang, Jingda Tang, Xavier P. Morelle, Joost Vlassak, Zhigang Suo

Imitating origami principles in active or programmable materials opens the door for development
of origami-inspired self-folding structures for not only aesthetic but also functional purposes. A
variety of programmable materials enabled self-folding structures have been demonstrated across
various fields and scales. These folding structures have finite thickness and the mechanical
properties of the active materials dictate the folding process. Yet formalizing the use of origami
rules for use in computer modeling has been challenging, owing to the zero-thickness theory and

PhD project 2 (Reference: NGCM-0080)

Design and optimisation of bio-inspired programmable surfaces with active materials

Biotribology Group, nCATS
Faculty of Engineering and the Environment
University of Southampton, United Kingdom

Background

Tough bonding of hydrogels to diverse non-porous surfaces

Hyunwoo Yuk, Teng Zhang,Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada & Xuanhe Zhao

Nature Materials (2015) doi:10.1038/nmat4463

Abstract: Brittle materials propagate opening cracks under tension. When stress increases beyond a critical magnitude, then quasistatic crack propagation becomes unstable. In the presence of several precracks, a brittle material always propagates only the weakest crack, leading to catastrophic failure. Here, we show that all these features of brittle fracture are fundamentally modified when the material susceptible to cracking is bonded to a hydrogel, a common situation in biological tissues.

This mini-symposium is a part of the Interpore 2016 conference.

Sungmin Hong, Dalton Sycks, Hon Fai Chan, Shaoting Lin, Gabriel P. Lopez, Farshid Guilak, Kam W. Leong, Xuanhe Zhao, Advanced Materials, 27, 4035-4040, 2015.