Tough and fatigue-resistant polymer networks by crack tip softening.

Soft materials fail by crack propagation under external loads. While fracture toughness of a soft material can be enhanced by orders of magnitude, its fatigue threshold remains insusceptible. In this work, we demonstrate a crack tip softening (CTS) concept to simultaneously improve the toughness and threshold of a single polymeric network.

Dual pH-Responsive Hydrogel Actuator for Lipophilic Drug Delivery.

As one of the most promising drug delivery carriers, hydrogels have received considerable attention in recent years. Many previous efforts have focused on diffusion-controlled release, which allows hydrogels to load and release drugs in vitro and/or in vivo. However, it hardly applies to lipophilic drug delivery due to their poor compatibility with hydrogels.

Adhesive Tough Magnetic Hydrogels with High FeO Content.

Magnetic hydrogels have promising applications in flexible electronics, biomedical devices, and soft robotics. However, most existing magnetic hydrogels are fragile and suffer insufficient magnetic response. In this paper, we present a new approach to fabricate a strong, tough, and adhesive magnetic hydrogel with nontoxic polyacrylamide (PAAm) hydrogel as the matrix and the functional additive [3-(trimethoxysilyl)propyl methacrylate coated FeO] as the inclusions.

Soft Display Using Photonic Crystals on Dielectric Elastomers.

Soft display has been intensively studied in recent years in the wake of rapid development of a variety of soft materials. The currently existing solutions for translating the traditional hard display into the more convenient soft display mainly include light-emitting diodes, liquid crystals, quantum dots, and phosphors. The desired soft display should take the advantages of facile fabrication processes and cheap raw materials.

Stretch tuning of the Debye ring for 2D photonic crystals on a dielectric elastomer membrane.

The tunable diffracted pattern (Debye ring) of the well-ordered close-packed 2D photonic crystal (PC) is achieved via large deformation of the dielectric elastomer (DE) membrane for the first time. Two deformation models are proposed, the in-plane deformation driven by voltage and the out-of-plane deformation actuated by pressure. Both experimental and theoretical analyses are conducted to explore the tunability of the DE stretch on the Debye ring of the 2D PC, by voltage and pressure.