Control and Analysis of Swelling Deformation of Hydrogel Beams Through Multilayer Design

Abstract

In this paper, we suggest a design strategy for multilayer hydrogel beams with controllable swelling deformation and bending, which can be used in soft devices. We adopt a constitutive model that considers the entanglement chains of the hydrogel and an analytical method for solving multilayer hydrogel beams is developed. First, the reliability of the design strategy is provided by comparing analytical solutions and numerical results. Then, guided by the above design strategy, we quantitatively investigate hydrogel beams with gradient distribution and study the effects of material and distribution on the deformation and bending behavior of the structures. The results show that under non-gradient distribution, all structures with an odd number of total layers only undergo in-plane expansion, while all those with an even number of total layers undergo expansion and bending. However, this law will be broken at the gradient distribution. The introduction of entanglement chains and gradient distribution strategy increase the range of adjustment for deformation and bending. This work is expected to provide new insights into the design of multilayer hydrogel beams for material–structure–function integration.