Hydrogels have promising applications in diverse areas, especially wet environments including tissue engineering, wound dressing, bio-medical devices, and underwater soft robotics. Despite strong demands in such applications and great progresses in irreversible bonding of robust hydrogels to diverse synthetic and biological surfaces, tough hydrogels with fast, strong, and reversible underwater adhesion are still not available yet. Herein, we propose a strategy to develop hydrogels demonstrating such characteristics by combining macro-scale surface engineering and nano-scale dynamic bonds [1-4]. Based on this strategy, we obtained excellent underwater adhesion performance of tough hydrogels with dynamic ionic and hydrogen bonds, on diverse substrates, including hard glasses, soft hydrogels, and biological tissues. The proposed strategy can be generalized to develop other soft materials with underwater adhesion.

Multi-scale design of tough hydrogels with fast, strong, and reversible underwater adhesion

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

[Author Benefits](https://scimeetings.acs.org/?utm_source=pubs_content_marketing&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=0320_MCF_NPI_Launch_Spring_Homepage&ref=pubs_content_marketing)

[How to use SciMeetings](https://storage.googleapis.com/dl.morressier.com/acs/SciMeetings-ACSSpring2020-HowToGuide_M3020-Final.pdf)

[Frequently Asked Questions](https://storage.googleapis.com/dl.morressier.com/acs/SciMtng_ACSNMSp2020_FAQ_M3120_Final.pdf)

ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.