Designing hydrogels with both excellent mechanical property and self-healing ability has attracted enormous attentions because applications of hydrogels are restricted in many fields due to their poor mechanical property and...
Self‐healing hydrogels often possess poor mechanical properties which largely limits their applications in many fields. In this work, boron nitride nanosheets are introduced into a network of the poly(vinyl alcohol)/borax (PVA/borax) hydrogels to enhance the mechanical properties of the hydrogel without compromising the self‐healing abilities. The obtained hydrogels exhibit excellent mechanical properties with a tensile strength of 0.410 ± 0.007 MPa, an elongation at break of 1712%, a Young's Modulus of 0.860 ± 0.023 MPa, and a toughness of 3.860 ± 0.075 MJ m−3. In addition, the self‐healing efficiency of the hydrogels is higher than 90% within 10 min at room temperature. Benefiting from the excellent self‐healing properties, the shapeability of the hydrogel fragments is observed using different molds. In addition, the hydrogels display rapid pH‐driven shape memory effects and can recover to their original shape within 260 s. Overall, this work provides a new approach to hydrogels with integrated excellent mechanical properties, self‐healing abilities, and rapid pH‐driven shape memory effects.
Recently, the wearable electronic devices have attracted extensive attention while the low stretchability and freezing-induced performance deterioration largely limit the applications in many fields. In this work, the poly(acrylamide-co-maleic acid) hydrogels are immersed in the triethylene glycol/sodium chloride/water solution to establish the dual-crosslinked organohydrogels, which present the extraordinary stretchability (1322 ± 75%) ascribed to the energy dissipation of physical interactions and stability of chemical crosslinked networks. Triethylene glycol forms strong hydrogen bonds with water, which interfere with the formation of intermolecular hydrogen bonds among water molecules at low temperatures and inhibit the formation of ice crystals in the organohydrogel networks.Sodium chloride imparts excellent electrical conductivity to the organohydrogel. As a result, a stretchable electronic sensor based on the organohydrogel is fabricated, which is strain-sensitive with a wide strain sensing window (0%-440%) and excellent stability. More importantly, the sensor based on the as-prepared organohydrogel could precisely detect various activities of the human model at À30 C leading to the widely application prospects.
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