While we normally work with single-polymer hydrogels, we had the opportunity to work with the Grunlan group at Texas A&M to study their charged double-network hydrogels. These hydrogels are tough! Looking more like cartilage all the time. In this paper we present evidence that their lubrication behavior matches or exceeds that of native cartilage. Higher […]
Many researchers are aware that hydrogels, even a single kind of hydrogel (polyacrylamide) can be designed to have properties that range from brittle to viscoelastic. It’s truly a versatile material! As hydrogels are being considered as replacements for cartilage in the body, they need to be able to take a beating: they can’t break under […]
Hydrogels are the next “engineering material” that we need new textbooks for, to teach the next generation of engineers to design with them. Shabnam’s work contributes directly to that, and over the past 4 years she has discovered that the material nature of the hydrogel determines how it wears away — sometimes it acts brittle, […]
As soft robots are the new normal, polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, is becoming ubiquitious in labs. You know it as the material that makes “sticky hands” you throw against the wall, and it can be a clear, or slightly cloudy (turbid) soft solid. It can be molded into any shape conceivable, especially shapes with more than […]
Prof. Dunn worked with high school girls attending the Girls Building Awesome Machines (GBAM) camp here at Illinois last week to define tribo-corrosive wear using a system we can all enjoy: the Tootsie Pop! The last line of the classic commercial says that the world may never know “how many licks” it takes to get […]