Abstract
Hydrogel is a general term used for water swollen and porous materials of polymeric, protein, peptidic, colloidal, surfactant, or lipid origin. Hydrogels are a mainstay in the food and pharmaceutical industries but are also increasingly finding applications in areas such as biosensing, microfluidics, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. Rheology is an appropriate method for characterizing hydrogel mechanical properties since it is quick, sensitive, requires small sample sizes, and is revealing of differences in architecture such as degree of cross-linking, proximity of the glass transition, structural homogeneity/heterogeneity and molecular weight. In this chapter we are discussing various aspects of rheology of hydrogels.
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