Unique framework effect induced by uniform silk fibroin dynamic nanospheres enables multiscale hydrogel with...

It is a significant challenge to obtain hydrogels simultaneously with low tensile energy dissipation, high compressive resilience and long durability. Herein, the uniform dynamic nanospheres (Sil-4H_0.75) derived from 4-Hydroxybutyl acrylate glycidyl ether grafted silk fibroin is designed to overcome this issue. Due to its uniform and dynamic characteristic, Sil-4H_0.75 could endow hydrogel with homogeneous multiscale structure and produce unique framework effect. Thus, transparent Sil-4H_0.75 crosslinked acrylamide hydrogel doped with Ag nanowires APS_3.75%/AgNW_0.1 exhibits a high stretchability (1260 %) and outstanding elastic resilience. The tensile energy dissipation ratio maintains a low value of 9 % across a wide 800 % strain range. A high compression resilience ratio of 92.2 % is kept after ten compression cycles under 90 % compressive strain. The orderly AgNWs motion guided by framework effect also make it be used as both tensile and compressive sensors and exhibits high gauge factor of 7.35, outstanding compression sensitivity of 30.379 kPa^-1 and excellent durability (up to 2000 cycles). The detection or other applications based on both two sensing modes are also demonstrated. In a word, this work affords a general strategy to achieve high-performance hydrogel based on uniform dynamic nanospheres which exhibits great potential in the applications of flexible wearable strain sensors.