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CPP: Fachverband Chemische Physik und Polymerphysik

CPP 1: Gels, Polymers Networks and Elastomers I

CPP 1.3: Vortrag

Montag, 17. März 2025, 10:15–10:30, H34

Effect of different network topologies on swelling and mechanical properties of polyelectrolyte hydrogels — •Somesh Kurahatti, Mariano Brito, David Beyer, and Christian Holm — Institute for Computational Physics, Stuttgart, Germany

We investigate the properties of polyelectrolyte hydrogels with various network heterogeneities, particularly their swelling capacity, elastic modulus and salt partitioning. We benchmark the scaling predictions for elastic modulus and equilibrium swelling ratio of the hydrogels under various salinity conditions, verifying the theoretically predicted behavior. Decoupling the elastic modulus from the swelling behavior is beneficial for applications such as super absorbers. Here, for example, now wants to increase the swelling ratio while maintaining a reasonable mechanical strength. We therefore explore mechanical and structural properties of the hydrogels with varying topologies, namely gels with dangling ends, gels with floating chains, and bottle-brush gels in counterpart to a reference regular gel. We observe that incorporating dangling ends changed swelling ratio and bulk modulus inline with the scaling predictions, whereas bottle-brush and floating-chain gels deviate from the predictions. Specifically, floating chains resulted in higher moduli and higher swelling ratio, while bottle-brush gels resulted in lower moduli and lower swelling ratios than the regular counterpart, each maintaining the same swelling ratio and modulus. The new swelling-mechanical relations allow us to treat them in a decoupled manner via the topology variation, which turns out to be of paramount relevance in the optimization and on-demand design of hydrogels.

Keywords: hydrogels; bulk modulus; swelling ratio; salt partitioning; dangling ends