Super Adhesive MXene‐based Nanocomposite Hydrogel with Self‐Healable and Conductivity Properties via Radiation Synthesis

Abstract

Functional adhesive hydrogels have attracted tremendous attention due to their versatile potential applications in electronic skins and biomedical engineering. MXenes are emerging 2D materials that promised to be attractive ideal candidates as nanofillers for nanocomposite hydrogels. Herein, a super adhesive MXene‐based nanocomposite hydrogel with self‐healable and conductivity properties is successfully fabricated via a one‐step γ‐radiation polymerization of 2‐(dimethylamino) ethyl methacrylate (DMAEMA) and Ti3C2Tx MXene nanosheets with ultralow contents serve as a crosslinking agent and functional nanofiller simultaneously. It is found that Ti3C2Tx not only plays an important role in the formation of uniform polymer network structure, but also improves the mechanical strength, conductivity, and adhesive properties of composite hydrogels significantly. The Ti3C2Tx/poly(2‐(dimethylamino) ethyl methacrylate) (PDMAEMA) nanocomposite hydrogel exhibits an ionic conductivity of 1.6 mS cm−1, and a super adhesive strength of 5041 kPa to the copper substrate. The resultant hydrogel also exhibits fast automatic self‐healing ability due to the hydrogen bonds between Ti3C2Tx and PDMAEMA chains. This work provides a new method to synthesize the robust MXene‐based environmentally sensitive nanocomposite adhesive hydrogels.