Fracture, fatigue, and friction of polymers in which entanglements greatly outnumber cross-links

🤖 Plain-English Summary

Longer and stronger; stiff but not brittle Hydrogels are highly water-swollen, cross-linked polymers. synthesized acrylamide gels in which dense entanglements could be achieved by using unusually low amounts of water, cross-linker, and initiator during the synthesis.

🔑 Key Findings

• Although they can be highly deformed, they tend to be weak, and methods to strengthen or toughen them tend to reduce stretchability.
• Two papers now report strategies to create tough but deformable hydrogels (see the Perspective by Bosnjak and Silberstein).
• introduced a toughening mechanism by storing releasable extra chain length in the stiff part of a double-network hydrogel.

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