Abstract
In order to understand fatigue crack propagation behavior in the friction of brittle hydrogels, we conducted reciprocating friction experiments between a hemi-cylindrical indenter and an agarose hydrogel block. We found that the fatigue life is greatly affected by the applied normal load as well as adhesion strength at the bottom of the gel–substrate interface. On the basis of in situ visualizations of the contact areas and observations of the fracture surfaces after the friction experiments, we suggest that the mechanical condition altered by the delamination of the hydrogel from the bottom substrate plays an essential role in determining the fatigue life of the hydrogel.
Highlights
Hydrogels have attracted much attention of both scientists and engineers because of their unique characteristics: they have a low elastic modulus with large deformability and often exhibit extremely low surface friction [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Because they are similar to natural articular cartilages in structure and properties [7], hydrogels are expected as a candidate material for artificial articular cartilages that could overcome the drawbacks in the present hard-material-based artificial cartilages and reproduce superior characteristics of natural cartilages [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
We report our fundamental studies on propagation behavior of fatigue cracks of hydrogels in reciprocating friction experiments
We studied the frictional behavior of the agarose hydrogels under three different adhesion-strength conditions: As received, piranha treatment (Piranha) treatment, and Filter paper
Summary
Hydrogels have attracted much attention of both scientists and engineers because of their unique characteristics: they have a low elastic modulus with large deformability and often exhibit extremely low surface friction [1,2,3,4,5,6]. There is a serious problem that we have to resolve; the low fatigue strength of hydrogels against repetitive loadings To tackle this problem, two different approaches can be considered: material science and mechanics approaches. By performing in situ visualization of frictional contact and observations of fracture surfaces after the friction experiments, we investigated the mechanisms responsible for the propagation of fatigue cracks
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