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To overcome the poor toughness of PC/PLA blends due to the intrinsic properties of materials and poor compatibility, thermoplastic urethane (TPU) was added to PC/PLA blends as a toughener; meantime, catalyst di-n-butyltin oxide (DBTO) was also added for catalyzing transesterification of components in order to modify the compatibility of blends. The mechanical, thermal, and rheological properties of blends were investigated systematically. The results showed that the addition of TPU improves the toughness of PC/PLA blends significantly, with the increase of TPU, the elongation at break increases considerably, and the impact strength increases firstly and then falls, while the tensile strength decreases significantly and the blends exhibit a typical plastic fracture behavior. Meantime, TPU is conducive to the crystallinity of PLA in blends which is inhibited seriously by PC and damages the thermal stability of blends slightly. Moreover, the increased TPU makes the apparent viscosity of blends melt decrease due to the well melt fluidity of TPU; the melt is closer to the pseudoplasticity melt. Remarkably, the transesterification between the components improves the compatibility of blends significantly, and more uniform structure results in a higher crystallinity and better mechanical properties.

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In order to improve the performance of traditional sodium alginate (SA) hydrogels cross-linked by Ca2+ ions to meet greater application demand, a strategy was designed to structure novel SA-based gels (named OP-PN gels) to achieve both stimulus responsiveness and improved mechanical strength. In this strategy, the SA chains are co-cross-linked by CaCl2 and cationic octa-ammonium polyhedral oligomeric silsesquioxane (Oa-POSS) particles as the first network, and an organically cross-linked poly(N-isopropyl acrylamide) (PNIPA) network is introduced into the gels as the second network. Several main results are obtained from the synthesis and characterization of the gels. For OP-PN gels, their properties depend on the content of both uniformly dispersed Oa-POSS and PNIPA network directly. The increased Oa-POSS and PNIPA network content significantly improves both the strength and resilience of gels. Relatively, the increased Oa-POSS is greatly beneficial to the modulus of gels, and the increased PNIPA network is more favorable to advancing the tensile deformation of gels. The gels with hydrophilic PNIPA network exhibit better swelling ability and remarkable temperature responsiveness, and their volume phase transition temperature can be adjusted by altering the content of Oa-POSS. The deswelling rate of gels increases gradually with the increase of POSS content due to the hydrophobic Si–O skeleton of POSS. Moreover, the enhanced drug loading and sustained release ability of the target drug bovine serum albumin displays great potential for this hybrid gel in the biomedical field.

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