“At 80% water content material, you’d assume It’d burst aside like a water balloon, However it doesn’t: it stays intact and withstands large compressive forces,” said Professor Oren Scherman who led the evaluation. “The properties of the hydrogel are seemingly at odds with Every completely different.”
All That might not water is a community of polymers.
“We use reversible crosslinkers to make gentle and stretchy hydrogels, however making A strong and compressible hydrogel is troublesome and designing A supplies with these properties Is completely counterintuitive,” said chemist Zehuan Huang.
The chosen crosslinking molecules are cucurbiturils – unusual barrel-shaped molecules – that On this case maintain two designer visitor molecules inside their voids “like a molecular handcuff” said Cambridge.
The supplies has a compressive strengths As a lot as 100MPa with no fracture, even when compressed at 93% strain over 12 cycles of compression and relaxation.
“We’ve revisited conventional polymer physics and created A mannequin new class Of suppliess that span The complete differ Of supplies properties from rubber-Want to glass-like,” said Scherman.
In a demonstrator, the evaluationers made a hydrogel strain sensor for exact-time monitoring of standing, strolling and leaping. Potential purposes embrace gentle robotics.
The work is revealed in Nature Materials as ‘Extremely compressible glass-like supramolecular polymer communitys‘ (solely abstract out there with out cost).
Watch a video of some being run over (the picture is a nonetheless from this video)