Structure and Properties of Functional Hydrogels

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is dedicated to developing new functional hydrogels with unique properties and original designs on hierarchical structure.

Hydrogels, composed of a three-dimensional, cross-linked polymer network and an abundance of water, are representative soft and wet materials. The soft and wet nature of hydrogels has already allowed them to find broad applications in various fields, such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, soft actuators, and flexible electronics. However, conventional hydrogels are mechanically brittle and weak, which severely limits their scope of applications. In the past two decades, a great amount of research has reported the successful preparation of mechanically strong and tough hydrogels by designing structures with sacrificial bonds; that is, the sacrificial bonds can break preferentially during deformation to dissipate energy, endowing the material with high toughness. Led by these pioneering studies, attempts were further made to construct novel structures in hydrogels, and subsequently, various hydrogels with special properties (e.g., anti-fracture, self-healing, adhesive, anti-fatigue, and anti-freezing) gradually emerged, greatly enriching the application fields of hydrogels.

The properties of hydrogels are highly dependent on their structures. Interestingly, functional hydrogels usually possess exquisite hierarchical structures in different scales, for example, at the nano-, micro-, meso-, and macro-scale. Understanding the structure–property relationship in hydrogels is vitally important for their functions and applications. Hence, within this topic, we aim to share state-of-the-art advances in developing functional hydrogels with excellent properties upon hierarchically structural design and expect to provide a powerful paradigm for developing new functional hydrogels. We sincerely welcome submissions in this exciting field and look forward to presenting these new works.

Dr. Chengtao Yu
Prof. Dr. Jian Hu
Dr. Yong Zheng
Dr. Xiaohua Chang
Guest Editors

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