Soft materials are often subject to repeated deformation in many applications, e.g., soft electronics, actuators, and wearable devices, leading to premature failures. Fracture and fatigue are two common failure modes. Therefore, strong, tough, self-healing, and anti-fatigue hydrogels and elastomers are highly desirable. Towards this goal, we combine the chemical and mechanical principles to design flaw-insensitive hydrogels and investigate how self-healing and energy dissipation affect fatigue fracture; we study the geometry and rheology of hydrogels on fatigue fracture; we also study the tribology of hydrogel surfaces and device an approach to reduce friction. The basic understanding of fracture and fatigue can help design and develop fatigue-resistant and self-heal materials.
Relevant papers on this topic.
- Bai, R., Yang, J., Morelle, X.P., Yang, C. and Suo, Z., 2018. Fatigue Fracture of Self-Recovery Hydrogels. ACS Macro Letters, 7(3), pp.312-317
- Bai, R., Yang, J. and Suo, Z., 2019. Fatigue of hydrogels. European Journal of Mechanics-A/Solids, 74, pp.337-370
- Bai, R., Chen, B., Yang, J. and Suo, Z., 2019. Tearing a hydrogel of complex rheology. Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids, 125, pp.749-761.
- Bai, R., Yang, J., Morelle, X.P. and Suo, Z., 2019. Flaw-Insensitive Hydrogels under Static and Cyclic Loads. Macromolecular Rapid Communications, 40(8), p.1800883.
- Mu, R., Yang, J., Wang, Y., Wang, Z., Chen, P., Sheng, H. and Suo, Z., 2020. Polymer-filled macroporous hydrogel for low friction. Extreme Mechanics Letters, p.100742.
- Chu, C.K., Joseph, A.J., Limjoco, M.D., Yang, J., Bose, S., Thapa, L.S., Langer, R., and Anderson, D.G., 2020. Chemical Tuning of Fibers Drawn from Extensible Hyaluronic Acid Networks. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 142(46), pp.19715-19721.