Journal
ACS NANO
Volume 13, Issue 4, Pages 3867-3874Publisher
AMER CHEMICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b00551
Keywords
dynamic hydrogel; cellulose nanocrystal; birefringence; anisotropy; liquid behavior
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Funding
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [ZH546/3-1, INST186/1281-1/FUGG]
- program Material Science Wood from Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture, Germany
- Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture [INST186/1281-1/FUGG]
- China Scholarship Council (CSC)
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Liquid solid transition is a widely used strategy to shape polymeric materials and encode their microstructures. However, it is still challenging to fully exploit liquid behaviors of material precursors. In particular, the dynamic and static liquid behaviors naturally conflict with each other, which makes it difficult to integrate their advantages in the same materials. Here, by utilizing a shear-thinning phenomenon in the dynamic hybrid hydrogels, we achieve a hydrodynamic alignment of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) and preserve it in the relaxed hydrogel networks due to the much faster relaxation of polymer networks (within 500 s) than CNC after the unloading of external force. During the following drying process, the surface tension of hydrogels further enhances the orientation index of CNC up to 0.872 in confined geometry, and these anisotropic microstructures demonstrate highly tunable birefringence (up to 0.004 14). Due to the presence of the boundaries of dynamic hydrogels, diverse xerogels including fibers, films, and even complex three-dimensional structures with variable anisotropic microstructures can be fabricated without any external molds.
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