Smart Antifreeze Hydrogels with Abundant Hydrogen Bonding for Conductive Flexible Sensors

Recently, flexible sensors based on conductive hydrogels have been widely used in human health monitoring, human movement detection and soft robotics due to their excellent flexibility, high water content, good biocompatibility. However, traditional conductive hydrogels tend to freeze and lose their...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Gels 2022-06, Vol.8 (6), p.374
Main Authors: Dai, Bailin, Cui, Ting, Xu, Yue, Wu, Shaoji, Li, Youwei, Wang, Wu, Liu, Sihua, Tang, Jianxin, Tang, Li
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acrylamide
Anti-freeze solutions
antifreeze conductive hydrogel
Automation
Biocompatibility
Bond strength
Butanediol
Chemical bonds
Chemical properties
Chemical research
Colloids
Flexibility
Flexible components
flexible sensor
Glycerol
Human motion
Hydrogels
Hydrogen bonding
Hydrogen bonds
Ice crystals
Ice formation
intelligent gel
Low temperature environments
Manufacturing engineering
Mechanical properties
Methods
Moisture content
Motion perception
Polymers
Robotics
Sensors
Temperature
Tensile stress
Water chemistry
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Summary:Recently, flexible sensors based on conductive hydrogels have been widely used in human health monitoring, human movement detection and soft robotics due to their excellent flexibility, high water content, good biocompatibility. However, traditional conductive hydrogels tend to freeze and lose their flexibility at low temperature, which greatly limits their application in a low temperature environment. Herein, according to the mechanism that multi−hydrogen bonds can inhibit ice crystal formation by forming hydrogen bonds with water molecules, we used butanediol (BD) and N−hydroxyethyl acrylamide (HEAA) monomer with a multi−hydrogen bond structure to construct LiCl/p(HEAA−co−BD) conductive hydrogel with antifreeze property. The results indicated that the prepared LiCl/p(HEAA−co−BD) conductive hydrogel showed excellent antifreeze property with a low freeze point of −85.6 °C. Therefore, even at −40 °C, the hydrogel can still stretch up to 400% with a tensile stress of ~450 KPa. Moreover, the hydrogel exhibited repeatable adhesion property (~30 KPa), which was attributed to the existence of multiple hydrogen bonds. Furthermore, a simple flexible sensor was fabricated by using LiCl/p(HEAA−co−BD) conductive hydrogel to detect compression and stretching responses. The sensor had excellent sensitivity and could monitor human body movement.
ISSN:2310-2861
2310-2861
DOI:10.3390/gels8060374