Citation:
Qi Ge, Chen, Zhe , Cheng, Jianxiang , Zhang, Biao , Zhang, Yuan Fang, Li, Honggeng , He, Xiangnan , Yuan, Chao , Liu, Ji , Magdassi, Shlomo , and Qu, Shaoxing . 2021.
“3D Printing Of Highly Stretchable Hydrogel With Diverse Uv Curable Polymers”. Science Advances, 7, Pp. eaba4261.
Abstract:
Hydrogel-polymer hybrids have been widely used for various applications such as biomedical devices and flexible electronics. However, the current technologies constrain the geometries of hydrogel-polymer hybrid to laminates consisting of hydrogel with silicone rubbers. This greatly limits functionality and performance of hydrogel-polymer–based devices and machines. Here, we report a simple yet versatile multimaterial 3D printing approach to fabricate complex hybrid 3D structures consisting of highly stretchable and high–water content acrylamide-PEGDA (AP) hydrogels covalently bonded with diverse UV curable polymers. The hybrid structures are printed on a self-built DLP-based multimaterial 3D printer. We realize covalent bonding between AP hydrogel and other polymers through incomplete polymerization of AP hydrogel initiated by the water-soluble photoinitiator TPO nanoparticles. We demonstrate a few applications taking advantage of this approach. The proposed approach paves a new way to realize multifunctional soft devices and machines by bonding hydrogel with other polymers in 3D forms.
