Strong Adhesion, High Toughness Hydrophobic Hydrogels
A special issue of Gels (ISSN 2310-2861).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 May 2022) | Viewed by 2469
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue on “Strong Adhesion, High Toughness Hydrophobic Hydrogels” is dedicated to recent developments from theoretical and experimental studies for the synthesis, characterization, and applications of hydrophobic interactions and hydrophobic hydrogels. Within this context, a broad range of subjects, including structures and dynamics, mechanics, adhesion, self-healing, sensoring, drug delivering, etc., will be covered.
Hydrophobic associations are essential to the formation of large biological systems. Cell membranes, for example, are made up of macromolecules known as phospholipids. Two hydrophobic tails (water-repelling) in a lipid interact with each other and exclude water, forming phospholipid bilayer membranes for survival, expelling water, and separating the contents of the cell from the outside environment. To keep a protein alive and biologically active, hydrophobic interactions also allow the protein to decrease its surface area and undesirable water interactions. Similarly, the alternating hydrophobic and crosslinking domains in elastin contribute to the high mechanical property and insolubility in water. Due to these soft tissues, hydrophobic associations extensively occur in hydrogel formation to endow various functions, such as high mechanical strength, self-assemble performance, strain sensitivity, long-term sustained controlled release of macromolecular drugs, stimuli responsibility, self-healing ability, etc. Thus far, various tough hydrogels have been successfully designed by hydrophobic interactions, such as folded protein hydrogels, triblock hydrogels, organic hydrogels, etc. Compared to other non-covalent interactions such as hydrogen interactions or electrostatic interactions, the hydrophobic interactions in a hydrogel make the polymer chains shrink and aggregate; that is, the hydrophobic hydrogel could bear a large deformation and good resistance to a high concentration of saltwater. For these characteristics, hydrophobic hydrogels are used to design sensors and devices, and even for a more diverse range of applications. Examples include soft robots, biomedical devices, artificial skin, tissue adherence, 3D printing, and wearable sensors, and drug delivery. Although many aspects of the hydrophobic hydrogels have been clarified, there are still many phenomena, structural interactions, and performance characteristics of hydrophobic hydrogels that that are yet to be discovered. We look forward to submissions of new results in the field of hydrophobic hydrogels.
Dr. Honglei Guo
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- strong adhesion
- high toughness
- hydrophobic interactions
- self-healing
- phase separation
- sensoring
- composite hydrogel
