Composition Design And Application Of Self-healing Conductive Hydrogels With Bioaffinity

In recent years,flexible conductive materials have shown great application prospects.As a new material with good bio-affinity and flexibility,hydrogel attracts the attention of many researchers.Conductive materials including graphene,metal and conjugated polymer,combined with self-healing hydrogels possess attract increasing attentions in biosensors and bioelectrodes.In this work,we used polypyrrole(PPy)as conductive materials and incorporated it into alginate-gelatin hydrogel,which contained lots of reversible Schiff base units serving as the crosslinker.First,we pretreated the sodium alginate and gelatin to prepare the hydrogel precursor solution.Then,by controlling the temperature and pH value,we separated the partly polymerization process of pyrrole from the hydrogel network formation process,thus forming the composite hydrogel with good morphology,flexibility,and conductivity as well.Thanks to the addition of polypyrrole,the mechanical properties of hydrogels were significantly enhanced.Finally,we have tried on the application of polypyrrole-doped gelatin alginate-based self-healing conductive hydrogel.Firstly,a self-healing circuit was designed,and the repair and reconfigurable circuit of the disconnected circuit was studied.The circuit has good electrical conductivity and can achieve self-healing within 30 minutes when it is disconnected.In addition,we also studied its response towards bending or compression stress and gave path to a new direction for its application.This work proposed a novel structure of the self-healing conductive hydrogel,demonstrated the applications as circuit conductor and mechanical sensor.And it enabled potential applications in a wide range of fields including circuit repair material,biocompatible/medical devices,and sensors.