Georgetown Scientists Explore Double Network Gels That Can Be Programmed Like Smart Materials
Posted in News Story
A new study led by Georgetown University’s Institute for Soft Matter Synthesis and Metrology (ISMSM) researchers, Prof. Emanuela Del Gado, Dr. Mauro L. Mugnai and Rose Tchuenkam Batoum, titled “Inter-Species Interactions in Dual, Fibrous Gel Enable Control of Gel Structure and Rheology,” published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveals a powerful way to fine-tune the structure and stiffness of soft gels. These are materials found in everything from biomedical devices to synthetic tissues.
The research team drew inspiration from biological tissues. The study explores how two different types of particle networks within a gel can work together—or resist each other—to change how the material behaves. This study reveals how different gel network architectures can be engineered to control mechanical properties like stiffness, resilience and reprogrammability. By adjusting the strength of stickiness and lateral attraction between these particle networks, researchers found they could control whether the gel becomes soft and pliable or firm and supportive.
Why It Matters
Think of it like a recipe: depending on how the ingredients interact, you get something stretchy, stiff, or somewhere in between. These findings could lead to programmable gels—materials that can adapt their shape and function in response to changes in temperature, light, or chemical environment. This provides novel insight for materials that can be used to design soft robotics, biomedical implants and materials that mimic living tissue.
What They Found
Using simulations, the research team tested how the networks formed and behaved under different conditions:
- Preventing interspecies bundling kept the networks separate, whereas bundling allows for formation of gels where the two networks are closely intertwined.
- When the species form separate but interspersed networks, the resulting composite material tends to be robust to changes in composition, and to modifications of the environment, which could be due to humidity or pH changes. Hence, these gels could maintain their overall response even when these changes occur after formation, making them ideal for applications requiring resilience.
- Enabling bundling of fibers of different species caused the networks to tangle together, creating materials that are now instead extremely sensitive, tunable, and therefore reprogrammable, by changing formulations or environmental conditions.
Importantly, depending on the architecture these gels can be made to be reprogrammable, meaning their properties can be adjusted even after they’ve formed, something not possible in traditional materials.
Looking Ahead
This research lays the groundwork for making synthetic materials that behave more like biological tissues, where structure and function are intertwined. Future experiments will explore how to bring these concepts into real-world materials, including those made of colloids or polymers, and how to trigger changes using external stimuli like light or temperature.
About the Researchers
Rose Tchuenkam Batoum is a Ph.D. student in the Del Gado Lab, where she investigates how structure and interactions drive the behavior of complex soft materials.
Emanuela Del Gado, Professor of Physics and Director of ISMSM, studies the mechanics of disordered materials like gels and glasses, bridging theory and simulation to design smarter materials.
Mauro L. Mugnai, an ISMSM-NIST Postdoctoral Fellow, uses molecular simulations to study how soft matter self-assembles and responds to forces, with a special interest in biologically inspired systems.
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