A strong and stretchy bond

The majority of synthetic hydrogels have weak adhesion to other surfaces, are barely stretchable, and are brittle.According to Zhao, “they are frequently used as degradable biomaterials at the current stage.”If you want to use hydrogels to make an electronic device, you need to think about the hydrogels’ and interfaces’ long-term stability.

His team came up with a design strategy for robust hydrogels to get around these problems. They mixed water with a small amount of selected biopolymers to make soft, stretchy materials with stiffnesses between 10 and 100 kilopascals, which are about the same range as soft tissues in humans.The specialists likewise conceived a strategy to security the hydrogel to different nonporous surfaces unequivocally.

The researchers used their methods in the new study to show how the hydrogel can be used in a variety of ways, including encasing a titanium wire to make a transparent, stretchable conductor.They found that the encapsulated wire maintained constant electrical conductivity after being stretched multiple times in experiments.