The emerging applications of hydrogels in devices and machines require these soft materials 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 unde...
In these applications, high stretchability, low hysteresis, and anti-fatigue fracture are essential but can be rarely met in the same hydrogels simultaneously. Here, we demonstrate a hydrogel design using tandem-repeat proteins as the cross-linkers and random coiled polymers as the percolating ...
Design principle for anti-fatigue-fracture hydrogels. (A) Illustration of fatigue crack propagation in an amorphous hydrogel and in hydrogels with low and high crystallinities under cyclic loads. The yellow areas represent crystalline domains, and the blue areas denote amorphous domains. In the amorph...
yet most hydrogels are too fragile to tolerate cyclic mechanical loads. Single-network hydrogels lack a mechanism to prevent crack propagation and facilitate energy dissipation. Therefore, they are intrinsically weak and prone to fracture. On the other hand, double-network hydrogels are famous for the...