Structure and Properties of Functional Hydrogels (2nd Edition)

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue is dedicated to developing new functional hydrogels with unique properties, original designs and a 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 significant volume of research has reported the successful preparation of mechanically strong and tough hydrogels via the design of 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 have been 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) have gradually emerged, thus greatly enriching the application prospects of hydrogels.

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

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

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• functional hydrogels
• hierarchical structure
• multiscale structure
• structure–property relationship
• mechanical property