Slippery hydrogel with desiccation-tolerant ‘skin’ for high-precision additive manufacturing

Abstract

Hydrogels inevitably undergo dehydration, structural collapse, and shrinkage deformation due to the uninterrupted evaporation in the atmosphere, thereby losing their flexibility, slipperiness, and manufacturing precision. Here, we propose a novel bioinspired strategy to construct a spontaneously formed ‘skin’ on the slippery hydrogels by incorporating biological stress metabolites trehalose into the hydrogel network, which can generate robust hydrogen bonding interactions to restrain water evaporation. The contents of trehalose in hydrogel matrix can also regulate the desiccation-tolerance, mechanical properties, and lubricating performance of slippery hydrogels in a wide range. Combining vat photopolymerization three-dimensional printing and trehalose-modified slippery hydrogels enables to achieve the structural hydrogels with high resolution, shape fidelity, and sophisticated architectures, instead of structural collapse and shrinkage deformation caused by dehydration. And thus, this proposed functional hydrogel adapts to manufacture large-scale hydrogels with sophisticated architectures in a long-term process. As a proof-of-concept demonstration, a high-precision and sophisticated slippery hydrogel vascular phantom was easily fabricated to imitate guidewire intervention. Additionally, the proposed protocol is universally applicable to diverse types of hydrogel systems. This strategy opens up a versatile methodology to fabricate dry-resistant slippery hydrogel for functional structures and devices, expanding their high-precision processing and broad applications in the atmosphere.