Skip to main content
. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2015 Jan 28.
Published in final edited form as: Macromolecules. 2014 Jan 16;47(2):791–799. doi: 10.1021/ma401684w

Figure 2.

Figure 2

Comparison of the mechanical response of unextended gels and chain extended gels. (A) The effect of chain entanglement is demonstrated in the linear viscoelastic domain: frequency sweeps of hydrogel P4 (left) and o-Cys-P4-Cys (right) at 15 (w/v)% at 25 °C. (B) Compared to P4 (left), the entangled o-Cys-P4-Cys hydrogel (right) shows significant creep resistance and elastic recovery. The inset in the right panel shows the same data magnified to enhance detail. Measurements were performed on 15 (w/v)% samples at 25 °C. (C) Uniaxial tensile experiment (25 °C) on o-Cys-P4-Cys at 15 (w/v)% showing remarkable improvement on the hydrogel’s toughness and extensibility upon introducing entanglement. (D) Surface erosion of hydrogel P4 and o-Cys-P4-Cys at 15 (w/v)% at 35 °C. The erosion rate was estimated from a linear fit of the data. Error bars represent the standard deviations of three separate experiments. (E) A stretched dogbone gel specimen o-Cys-P4-Cys at 15 (w/v)% during tensile loading at 3,100% engineering strain.