Journal
ADVANCED SCIENCE
Volume 8, Issue 16, Pages -Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/advs.202100968
Keywords
brush polymers; fast-forming hydrogels; multifunctional crosslinkers; polymer hydrogels; polymer NPs
Categories
Funding
- MRSEC Program of the National Science Foundation [DMR 1419807]
- MRSEC Shared Experimental Facilities at MIT
- National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG)
- JSPS KAKENHI [16J09350, 20K15341]
- Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research [20K15341, 16J09350] Funding Source: KAKEN
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Brush polymers show great potential in enhancing gelation kinetics and stiffness of hydrogels without the need to change polymer composition or crosslinking chemistry. Their unique structure also results in restricted or nonswelling behavior of gels at different temperatures.
Brush polymers have emerged as components of novel materials that show huge potential in multiple disciplines and applications, including self-assembling photonic crystals, drug delivery vectors, biomimetic lubricants, and ultrasoft elastomers. However, an understanding of how this unique topology can affect the properties of highly solvated materials like hydrogels remain under investigated. Here, it is investigated how the high functionality and large overall size of brush polymers enhances the gelation kinetics of low polymer weight percent gels, enabling 100-fold faster gelation rates and 15-fold higher stiffness values than gels crosslinked by traditional star polymers of the same composition and polymer chain length. This work demonstrates that brush polymer topology provides a useful means to control gelation kinetics without the need to manipulate polymer composition or crosslinking chemistry. The unique architecture of brush polymers also results in restrained or even nonswelling behavior at different temperatures, regardless of the polymer concentration. Brush polymers therefore are an interesting tool for examining how high-functionality polymer building blocks can affect structure-property relationships and chemical kinetics in hydrogel materials, and also provide a useful rapidly-setting hydrogel platform with tunable properties and great potential for multiple material applications.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available