Abstract:
Biological tissues including muscles, cartilage and other human tissues have excellent mechanical anisotropy and electrical anisotropy due to their reasonable arrangement of microstructures. The anisotropic hydrogel has excellent function due to its ordered orientation structure, which shows great application prospects in biomimetic muscles, actuators, drug delivery, and flexible sensing. However, the methods to prepare anisotropic hydrogels are limited. Inspired by the anisotropic structure from nature products, we proposed a strategy to build anisotropic hydrogel based on plant skeleton. First, we observed and searched for anisotropic structures among diverse vegetables, and pre-treated them to obtain anisotropic skeleton. Furthermore, the cross-linking of polyacrylamide (PAM) within the anisotropic skeleton was
in-situ initiated, resulting in a hybrid anisotropic hydrogel. The anisotropic hydrogel with plant skeleton and PAM hydrogel could be successfully constructed. A highly anisotropy in structure and mechanical property could be achieved. This work obtained a highly anisotropic hydrogel with a feasible method, and we hoped to shed new lights for a novel anisotropic hydrogel construction.