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Nature Materials 

Published: 09 November 2015

http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/v15/n2/abs/nmat4463.html 

■  Researchers

Hyunwoo Yuk, Teng Zhang, Shaoting Lin, German Alberto Parada & Xuanhe Zhao

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Soft Active Materials Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

■  Abstract

In many animals, the bonding of tendon and cartilage to bone is extremely tough (for example, interfacial toughness ∼800 J m−2; refs 1,2), yet such tough interfaces have not been achieved between synthetic hydrogels and non-porous surfaces of engineered solids3,4,5,6,7,8,9. Here, we report a strategy to design tough transparent and conductive bonding of synthetic hydrogels containing 90% water to non-porous surfaces of diverse solids, including glass, silicon, ceramics, titanium and aluminium. The design strategy is to anchor the long-chain polymer networks of tough hydrogels covalently to non-porous solid surfaces, which can be achieved by the silanation of such surfaces. Compared with physical interactions, the chemical anchorage results in a higher intrinsic work of adhesion and in significant energy dissipation of bulk hydrogel during detachment, which lead to interfacial toughness values over 1,000 J m−2. We also demonstrate applications of robust hydrogel–solid hybrids, including hydrogel superglues, mechanically protective hydrogel coatings, hydrogel joints for robotic structures and robust hydrogel–metal conductors.

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