Highly Tough Bioinspired Ternary Hydrogels Synergistically Reinforced by Graphene/Xonotlite Network.

The application fields of hydrogels are often severely limited by their weak mechanical performance. It is therefore highly demanded to develop an effective strategy to fabricate mechanically strong hydrogels. Herein, a kind of bioinspired ternary hydrogel consisting of graphene oxide (GO) nanosheets, xonotlite nanowires, and polyacrylamide (PAM) is constructed under the synergy of hydrogen bonding-induced GO/xonotlite network and the penetrated PAM chain network. Benefiting from the effective energy dissipation mechanism caused by double-network structural design and the strong hydrogen bonding interaction between two nanobuilding blocks, the gel exhibits a high toughness of 22 MJ m at an elongation of 2750%. Even notched with 1/4 size, it still holds a large extensibility of 2180% its initial length. These high-performance hydrogels could be of great interest in the fields of tissue engineering and biomedical areas.