Hydrogels have shown significant potential in everything from wound dressings to soft robots, but their applications have been limited from their lack of toughness – until now.
A team of scientists at Hokkaido University have developed a new set of hydrogel composites or “fiber-reinforced soft composites” that combine hydrogels with woven fiber fabric to create a material that is five times stronger than carbon steel.
Composite materials have been around for millennia and the principle is very simple. A very soft substance like mud can be made strong enough to make bricks by adding straw as a tempering material.
The same applies to adding crushed pottery to brick, seashells fragments to ceramic, or glass fiber to plastic.
