The central challenge for merging human-machine interfaces is the seamless integration between soft, wet, living tissues and hard, dry, and non-living engineering materials. Wet adhesion is critical in this integration. However, the high water content in the tissue, or biological hydrogel, prevents the strong adhesion with other materials. To address this grand challenge, we combine the chemical, material, and mechanical design principles to invent several wet adhesion technologies, including molecular sutures, tough tissue adhesives, molecular staples, dry-wet adhesion, and instant, tough, and noncovalent adhesive tapes, and demonstrated their emerging applications such as wound sealant, sensors, and transdermal drug delivery. We also investigated the mechanics of adhesion through extensive experimental and theoretical studies and proposed a unifying principle for strong wet adhesion, which elicits the synergy of chemistries of bonds, mechanics of dissipation, and topologies of connections. This synergy extends the hydrogel adhesion to various materials (another hydrogel, tissue, elastomer, plastic, metal, glass, and ceramic) in various operations (cast, coat, print, attach, pierce, and glue) and is also applicable to general adhesion of any materials. Strong adhesion can be made permanent, reversible, degradable, or on-demand detachable. The development of hydrogel adhesion and its applications adheres disciplines, discovers interlinks, and forges cohesion.
Relevant papers on this topic.
- Yang, J., Bai, R., and Suo, Z., 2018. Topological Adhesion of Wet Materials. Advanced Materials, p.1800671
- Yang, J., Bai, R., Chen, B. and Suo, Z., 2019. Hydrogel Adhesion: A Supramolecular Synergy of Chemistry, Topology, and Mechanics. Advanced Functional Materials, p.1901693
- Yang, J., Bai, R., Li, J., Yang, C., Yao, X., Liu, Q., Vlassak, J.J., Mooney, D.J. and Suo, Z., 2019. Design molecular topology for wet-dry adhesion. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 11(27), pp.24802-24811.
- Steck, J., Yang, J. and Suo, Z., 2019. Covalent Topological Adhesion. ACS Macro Letters, 8, pp.754-758.
- Li, J., Celiz, A.D.#, Yang, J.#, Yang, Q., Wamala, I., Whyte, W., Seo, B.R., Vasilyev, N.V., Vlassak, J.J., Suo, Z. and Mooney, D.J., 2017. Tough adhesives for diverse wet surfaces. Science, 357(6349), pp.378-381
- Chen, B., Yang, J., Bai, R. and Suo, Z., 2019. Molecular Staples for Tough and Stretchable Adhesion in Integrated Soft Materials. Advanced Healthcare Materials, p.1900810
- Steck, J., Kim, J., Yang, J., Hassan, S. and Suo, Z., 2020. Topological adhesion. I. Rapid and strong topohesives. Extreme Mechanics Letters, p.100803
- Yang, J., Steck, J., Bai, R., and Suo, Z., 2020. Topological adhesion II. Stretchable adhesion. Extreme Mechanics Letters, p100891
- Wang, Y., Jia, K., Xiang, C., Yang, J., Yao, X. and Suo, Z., 2019. Instant, tough, noncovalent adhesion. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 11(43), pp.40749-40757.
- Yang, J., Steck, J. and Suo, Z., 2020. Gelation kinetics of alginate chains through covalent bonds. Extreme Mechanics Letters, p.100898