Investigation of the preparation method and its effect on the mechanical properties of fiber-reinforced Hydrogels

This work aims to study the mechanical properties of two kinds of hydrogels, the first is based on natural polymers derived from decellularized bovine cartilage tissue and the second is based on synthetic polymers namely polyethyleneglycole dimethacrylate. In this project, we tried on the one hand to reinforce the hydrogels using fibers and on the other hand to optimize the mechanical properties by studying the influence of the mixing parameters. The first study focused on Polyethylene glycol di-methacrylate hydrogel. We found that higher mixing time resulted in increased strength and stiffness of this hydrogel with a rate of 11%. In a second study we investigated the influence of different NFC fiber concentrations on the young modulus of decellularied extracellular matrix based hydrogels.