A self-healing hydrogel formation strategy via exploiting endothermic interactions between polyelectrolytes
Ying Ren1, Ruyun Lou, Xiaocen Liu
1Laboratory of Biomedical Materials Engineering, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dalian 116023, P. R. China. xiehg@dicp.ac.cn yuwt@dicp.ac.cn.
Chemical Communications (Cambridge, England)
|April 15, 2016
Abstract:
We report a strategy to synthesize self-healing hydrogels via exploiting endothermic interactions between polyelectrolytes. Natural polysaccharides and their derivatives were used to form reversible polyelectrolyte complexes by selecting appropriately charged chemical groups and counterions. This simple and effective method to fabricate self-healing hydrogels will find applications in diverse fields such as surface coating and 3D printing.
