Expanding the Non-Yielding Region of Tough and Strong Hydrogels

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In the past year, we combined the small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and the mechanical method to study the structure change of the tough and non-yielding hydrogels. Through SAXS, we obtained the network deformation in the scale of 50 nanometers. We found that the nanoscale deformaiton of gel is affine to the macroscopic deformation of bulk gel. Through mechanical chemistry method, we confirmed that the chain scission does not occur during deformation.We performed cyclic loading to check how energy dissipates during deformation. In addition, we checked the role of hyperconnectivity on the network deformation. Our current results suggest that the interplay between hyperconnectivity and stress transfer between two networks is important to the nonaffine deformation.