Fatigue-resistant adhesion of hydrogels
Name
s41467-020-14871-3.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
4.47 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
333408eab87971d266621f2e89afff52
Author(s)
Liu, Ji
Lin, Shaoting
Liu, Xinyue
Qin, Zhao
Yang, Yueying
Zang, Jianfeng
Zhao, Xuanhe
Date Issued
February 2020
Journal
Nature Communications
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Liu, Ji et al., "Fatigue-resistant Adhesion of Hydrogels." Nature Communications 11, 1 (February 2020): 1071 ©2020 Authors
Version
Final published version
Abstract
The adhesion of soft connective tissues (tendons, ligaments, and cartilages) on bones in many animals can maintain high toughness (∽800 J m−2) over millions of cycles of mechanical loads. Such fatigue-resistant adhesion has not been achieved between synthetic hydrogels and engineering materials, but is highly desirable for diverse applications such as artificial cartilages and tendons, robust antifouling coatings, and hydrogel robots. Inspired by the nanostructured interfaces between tendons/ligaments/cartilages and bones, we report that bonding ordered nanocrystalline domains of synthetic hydrogels on engineering materials can give a fatigue-resistant adhesion with an interfacial fatigue threshold of 800 J m−2, because the fatigue-crack propagation at the interface requires a higher energy to fracture the ordered nanostructures than amorphous polymer chains. Our method enables fatigue-resistant hydrogel coatings on diverse engineering materials with complex geometries. We further demonstrate that the fatigue-resistant hydrogel coatings exhibit low friction and low wear against natural cartilages.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41467-020-14871-3
