Highly Entangled, Mechanically Robust Hydrogel Thin Films for Passive Cooling Materials via Open-Vessel Fabrication.

ABSTRACT: The scalable fabrication of hydrogels with high toughness and low hysteresis is critically hindered by oxygen inhibition, which typically produces brittle, highly crosslinked (HC) networks. This study presents an oxygen-tolerant photoinduced electron transfer-reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (PET-RAFT) strategy for synthesizing highly entangled (HE) polyacrylamide hydrogels under open-vessel conditions. By optimizing the water-to-monomer ratio (W = 3.9) and introducing lithium chloride (LiCl) for spatial confinement, we achieved a fundamental shift in mechanical performance. The optimized HE hydrogel exhibited a fracture energy of 1.39 MJ/m³ and a fracture strain of ~900%, starkly contrasting the brittle failure of the HC control (W = 20, C = 10^-2) at

SUBMITTER: Rong L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12469944 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature