Polymers

In this work, we demonstrated that cellular-scale hydrated starch granules, an underexplored component in materials science, could turn conventional hydrogels into tissue-like materials when composites were formed.

We demonstrated that sonication of gallium or gallium-based liquid metals in an aqueous solution of vinyl monomers could lead to rapid free radical polymerization, without the need for conventional molecular initiators.

Here, we presented a detailed study on the effects of NaCl concentration and the grafting density and molecular weight on the stability of PAA brushes during incubation in 0.1 M ethanolamine buffer (pH 9.0) solutions.

We developed a strategy to graft polymeric coating on liquid metal nanoparticles and the resulting nanoparticles can remain stable in biological buffers for at least 60 days without noticeable oxidation.

We reported visualization of mechanochemically assisted degrafting of surface-tethered poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) brushes in a basic aqueous buffer at nanometer to micrometer length scale by monitoring changes in local etching of silicon substrates.

We studied the stability of diblock copolymer brushes featuring a bottom neutral block, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) or poly(poly(ethylene glycol) methacrylate) (PPEGMA), and a top poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) block on flat silicon substrate

We explored an extremely facile method to fabricate metallic wires at room temperature.

In this work, we fabricate soft conductive wires composed of liquid metal and elastomer, and such wires could be stretched to more than 10 times of original lengths, without losing their conductivity.