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Nature produces soft materials with fascinating combinations of mechanical properties. For example, the mussel byssus embodies a combination of stiffness and toughness, a feature that is unmatched by synthetic hydrogels. Key to enabling these excellent mec ...
Developing hydrogels with optimal properties for specific applications is challenging as most of these properties, such as toughness, stiffness, swelling or deformability, are interrelated. The improvement of one property usually comes at the cost of anoth ...
Hydrogels are promising materials for bioengineering applications, and are good model materials for the study of hydrated biological tissues. As these materials often have a structural function, the measurement of their mechanical properties is of fundamen ...
Many soft natural tissues display a fascinating set of mechanical properties that remains unmatched by manmade counterparts. These unprecedented mechanical properties are achieved through an intricate interplay between the structure and locally varying the ...
Hydrogels are among the first materials expressly designed for their use in biomedicine. However, state-of-the-art applications of hydrogels are severely limited because they are typically either too soft or too brittle such that they cannot bear significa ...
Throughout nature, organisms fabricate a myriad of materials to sustain their lifestyle. Many of the soft materials are composed of water-swollen networks of organic molecules, so-called hydrogels. They generally contribute to the mechanical integrity of t ...