Abstract
Recently, “smart” hydrogels with either shape memory behavior or reversible actuation have received particular attention and have been further developed into sensors, actuators, or artificial muscles.
Highlights
Hydrogels are water-swollen three-dimensional polymeric networks that have been investigated by researchers due to their exceptionally promising potential in a wide range of applications, such as drug delivery,[1,2,3] sealing,[4,5,6] tissue engineering,[7,8,9] actuators,[10,11,12] etc
Nature inspired us with a variety of ideas to develop novel structures and to mimic natural properties, such as pinecone seeds that fall down because the hydrated pinecone has dried up
We presented two kinds of remarkable “smart” hydrogels inspired by nature, i.e., shape memory hydrogels (SMHs) and stimuliresponsive hydrogels (SRHs)
Summary
SMHs, as the name implies, are able to fix temporary shapes and recover to their original shape by forming or destructing reversible crosslinks upon external stimuli (e.g. by heat, magnetism, light and chemicals). The design principles of hydrogel actuators based on inhomogeneous structures have been described in many reports.[27,28,29] Nowadays, thanks to the rapid development of microtechnology, technologies for fabricating and designing subtle actuators, which meet the necessity of soft actuators used in microscales, have achieved promising growth. In this aspect, photo-lithography and 3D printing are the most representative techniques adopted in the development of hydrogel-based actuators to prepare hydrogels that mimic behaviors from nature, such as self-folding, twisting and bending in the absence of changes of specific environmental stimuli. A brief overview is given of hydrogel actuators with respect to their stimuli, motion-deformations, the technologies and their applications in specific examples
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