Abstract
Different from natural living systems that constantly evolve to adapt to the changing environment, most engineering materials are static in both form and function. The living characters of natural systems stem from a malleable building block that mainly consists of a dynamic macromolecular network and a liquid solution. To resemble the dynamic features of living materials, researchers started to incorporate various chain reactions such as new chain formation, chain dissociation and association, monomer insertion or extraction into polymer and polymeric gel designs. Through these systems, a range of living functions such as growth, self-healing and degradation have been realized. In this work, building from a statistical chain description, we formulate a non-equilibrium thermodynamic framework that couples various chain reactions, diffusion and deformation for the living gel systems. We first calibrate the model using the experimental data in literature on the growth of a living gel. We next investigate the evolution processes of the living gels in both open and closed systems. Using the model, we then study the structure–property relations of the dynamic living gels, which is useful in material design. At the end, we discuss how the different reaction rate and diffusion rate give rise to different morphology and mechanical properties of the living gels.
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