Publications by Michael David Kessler

Influence of the Degree of Swelling on the Stiffness and Toughness of Microgel-Reinforced Hydrogels

Esther Amstad, John Martin Kolinski, Tianyu Yuan, Michael David Kessler

The stiffness and toughness of conventional hydrogels decrease with increasing degree of swelling. This behavior makes the stiffness-toughness compromise inherent to hydrogels even more limiting for fully swollen ones, especially for load-bearing applicati ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2023

Hydroelastomers: soft, tough, highly swelling composites

Esther Amstad, Michael David Kessler

Inspired by the cellular design of plant tissue, we present an approach to make versatile, tough, highly water-swelling composites. We embed highly swelling hydrogel particles inside tough, water-permeable, elastomeric matrices. The resulting composites, w ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2022

Deformation and Fracture of Tough Microstructured Hydrogels

Michael David Kessler

Many natural materials are structured on different length scales. This structuring often leads to an intricate interplay between soft and stiff components, which significantly improves the fracture toughness of these materials. A class of soft material tha ...

EPFL2022

Does the Size of Microgels Influence the Toughness of Microgel-Reinforced Hydrogels?

Esther Amstad, Michael David Kessler

Rapid advances in the biomedical field increasingly often demand soft materials that can be processed into complex 3D shapes while being able to reliably bear significant loads. Granular hydrogels have the potential to serve as artificial tissues because t ...

WILEY-V C H VERLAG GMBH2022

Reinforcing hydrogels with in situ formed amorphous CaCO3

Esther Amstad, Matteo Hirsch, Ran Zhao, Tianyu Yuan, Huachuan Du, Michael David Kessler

Hydrogels are often employed for tissue engineering and moistening applications. However, they are rarely used for load-bearing purposes because of their limited stiffness and the stiffness-toughness compromise inherent to them. By contrast, nature uses hy ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2022

Everything in its right place: controlling the local composition of hydrogels using microfluidic traps

François Gallaire, Esther Amstad, Michael David Kessler

Many natural materials display locally varying compositions that impart unique mechanical properties to them which are still unmatched by manmade counterparts. Synthetic materials often possess structures that are well-defined on the molecular level, but p ...

ROYAL SOC CHEMISTRY2020

Influence of Fluorinated Surfactant Composition on the Stability of Emulsion Drops

Esther Amstad, Gianluca Nicolas Etienne, Michael David Kessler

Aqueous drops of a well-defined size are often used as small containers for conducting chemical and biochemical reactions, cell assays and as templates to produce microparticles. To prevent their coalescence, they must be stabilized, for example, using sur ...

Wiley-Blackwell2016