Abstract
Over the past few decades, research studies have established that the mechanical properties of hydrogels can be largely impacted by the addition of nanoparticles. However, the exact mechanisms behind such enhancements are not yet fully understood. To further explore the role of nanoparticles on the enhanced mechanical properties of hydrogel nanocomposites, we used chemically crosslinked polyacrylamide hydrogels incorporating silica nanoparticles as the model system. Rheological measurements indicate that nanoparticle-mediated increases in hydrogel elastic modulus can exceed the maximum modulus that can be obtained through purely chemical crosslinking. Moreover, the data reveal that nanoparticle, monomer, and chemical crosslinker concentrations can all play an important role on the nanoparticle mediated-enhancements in mechanical properties. These results also demonstrate a strong role for pseudo crosslinking facilitated by polymer–particle interactions on the observed enhancements in elastic moduli. Taken together, our work delves into the role of nanoparticles on enhancing hydrogel properties, which is vital to the development of hydrogel nanocomposites with a wide range of specific mechanical properties.
Highlights
Hydrogels have recently emerged as potential candidates for various biomedical and biotechnological applications owing to their unique physical and biochemical properties
We investigate whether nanoparticle-mediated enhancements in polymer mechanical properties extend to hydrogel nanocomposites
When elastic modulus is plotted against the concentration of Bis, the hydrogel elastic modulus initially increases with crosslinker concentration for all concentrations of the monomer
Summary
Hydrogels have recently emerged as potential candidates for various biomedical and biotechnological applications owing to their unique physical and biochemical properties. Over three decades of research have shown that the addition of nanoscopic filler particles to a variety of polymer systems (melts, elastomers, hydrogels, etc.) can have a large effect on their mechanical properties [6,7,8,9] Both experimental studies [10,11,12] and modeling analyses [13,14,15] have indicated that the enhancements in nanocomposite properties relative to those of pure polymers are due in large part to an increase in polymer crosslink/entanglement density mediated by strong interactions with nanoparticles. This system allowed us to evaluate the effects of nanoparticle-mediated physical crosslinking in comparison to chemical crosslinking, by varying the degree of both chemicaland nanoparticle-mediated crosslinking as well as the monomer concentration
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