Menurut to foreign media reports, a report published in the journal Chemistry on August 23 local time shows that Chenfeng Ke, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis, USA, has developed a unique design that can be made into tough and stretchable hydrogels. The material is flexible and durable because it has a circular sugar molecule that wraps around its polymer network and can be stretched tanpa sacrificing its strength.
Profesor Ke 3D printed so-called crystal domain enhanced slip ring hydrogels (CrysDoS-gels). He and his partners have also created a library of materials and provided ways to add the material to existing materials to improve their durability, such as adding it to material additives in the future to improve the durability of automotive parts.
Profesor Ke said: "Such tradisional plastik bahan need to balance various properties, either stretchable or strong. But if you connect those two features with a sliding joint, you get these two interesting properties."
Professor Ke said that the material is simple and adaptable, and can be combined with various hydrogels to improve the performance of different plastics. For example, it can be added to stretchable materials to make them stronger; Or it can be added to rigid materials to make them more flexible. In this study, the two chemists used 3D printing technology to demonstrate a potential application of the newly developed CrysDoS-gel hydrogel - it could be used as a pressure sensor.
"If you think about it, this hydrogel can extend the life of plastic parts and reduce waste generation," says Prof Ke.
