A self-healable and tough nanocomposite hydrogel crosslinked by novel ultrasmall aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles

作者：Jiang, Haoyang; Zhang, Gongzheng; Li, Feibo; Zhang, Yaqian; Lei, Yu; Xia, Yanhong; Jin, Xianghu; Feng, Xianqi; Li, Huanjun^*

来源：Nanoscale, 2017, 9(40): 15470-15476.

DOI：10.1039/c7nr04722c

• HIGH-STRENGTH
• MECHANICAL-PROPERTIES
• HEALING HYDROGELS
• GRAPHENE OXIDE
• SUPRAMOLECULAR HYDROGELS
• COMPOSITE HYDROGEL
• HYBRID HYDROGELS
• LINKING
• ACTUATORS
• NETWORK

Self-healing hydrogels like tissues or organs which are repaired automatically in response to damage show great promise. However, it remains a challenge to develop novel functional nanoparticles as cross-linkers to prepare tough and self-healing nanocomposite hydrogels. Here, we report the preparation of water-soluble ultrasmall aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles with a diameter of 2-3 nm through a simple sol-gel method. Furthermore, a tough nanocomposite hydrogel is prepared by the in situ copolymerization of acylamide and 2-acrylamido-2-methyl propane sulfonic acid in the presence of aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles. The resulting hydrogels exhibit high compressive strength of 18.9 MPa and an elongation at break of similar to 2100%. Importantly, the Al-NC gel displayed a high self-healing efficiency of 86% without any external stimulus at room temperature. Moreover, we found an interesting multi-hierarchical porous morphology of the Al-NC gel depending on the contents of the aluminum hydroxide nanoparticles. The tough nanocomposite hydrogel might provide a novel promising avenue for designing advanced self-healable soft materials for various biomedical applications.

• 出版日期2017-10-28
• 单位北京理工大学