Rapidly Visible-Light-Mediated Photogelations for One-Step Engineering Multifunctional Tough Hydrogel Tubes.
Wenqing XiaoPing ZhangHongqiu WeiYou YuPublished in: ACS macro letters (2020)
Hydrogel tubes as one kind of perfusable tubular materials, show promising applications in a wide spectrum of fields. However, there is still a great challenge to design a rapid, biocompatible, and straightforward strategy for one-step engineering tough hydrogel tubes, which have excellent mechanical properties, unique resilience, and multiple functions. Herein, we explore visible-light-mediated orthogonal photochemistry to achieve the fabrication of tough hydrogel tubes with double networks via a coaxial-nozzle spinning technique under short blue-light irradiation (∼20 s). The as-prepared tubes are tough (2.3 MJ m -3 ) and have mechanical strength (∼300 kPa) with a critical strain of 16, good fatigue resistance, and resilience (>95% within 3 min). These perfusable tubular hydrogels not only can be knitted and assembled to complicated 2D/3D structures, but also are designed to fabricate functional tubes in one step with the applications in fields of smart materials, soft electronics, and sensors.